Lawfare News

Technical Difficulties: Our Apologies and a Request for Help

Benjamin Wittes
Tuesday, August 20, 2013, 5:33 PM
Apologies to all for the site outages today. It has been a very frustrating day---and not the first in recent weeks. I wish I could claim this was some zero-day cyber-attack for which no non-profit web site could have possibly been prepared. That would at least be a Lawfare-worthy story. The truth of the matter, however, is that the problem appears to have been caused by a hardware issue at our hosting company, Bluehost---or so the tech support folks over there tell me.

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Apologies to all for the site outages today. It has been a very frustrating day---and not the first in recent weeks. I wish I could claim this was some zero-day cyber-attack for which no non-profit web site could have possibly been prepared. That would at least be a Lawfare-worthy story. The truth of the matter, however, is that the problem appears to have been caused by a hardware issue at our hosting company, Bluehost---or so the tech support folks over there tell me. Bluehost, for those of you who might ever have to host a web site of moderate traffic, has been a huge disappointment to us. We will be dropping it like a stone over the next few days, but unfortunately, this upgrade will come at significant financial cost to us. And this brings me to the other truth of the matter that today's events highlight: Running Lawfare has eclipsed my limited technical skills, which have grown a great deal over the last three years but have not grown nearly as fast as has the site itself. Lawfare now needs professional technical management and hosting, or this sort of outage is going to happen a lot. And that sort of service is expensive, and we could really use help from readers in funding it. So please use the donation button on our sidebar. Our deep thanks go to all of those who have already contributed to Lawfare---as well as to the law students who have been using our Amazon sidebar widget to buy textbooks and to the many other folks who have been using it to buy other stuff. And please continue to stick with us as we work through these growing pains.

Topics:
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.

Subscribe to Lawfare