Nope, the webserver service (apache) in this case, died during the night.  As the server isnt actively monitored 24/7/365, it stayed down until I crawled out of bed this morning and found it dead. 

Between the  dzone guys who monitor it from 6am-8pm EST and me who watches it about the same times but GMT, there is a small window there were its not being watched.  f***king typical really

but on the good news side of things, the new motherboard in the server seems to have fixed another small network problem and after the changes that I made this morning, it should be up pretty much all the time now, abeit for reboots given the sudden influx of linux kernel/ssl/ssh and apache bugs being patched over the last couple of weeks.

Have you guys thought about diversifying your API/XML query server? A small outage can really hurt! Would be nice if there were fail over/round robin servers, even if you only provide it on a donation or whatever basis.

Even with my local blocklists I can usually gather when you guys are down by when a few bots slip through.

Would you be open to other people offering up their server resources to host a (and I'm making assumptions about your setup here) mysql slave database and query API? Leaving them to do the administration with a read-only mysql login is going to generate negligible extra workload for you guys. I suppose hosting a mirror you do make yourself something of a target but its up to the person offering the server resources if they want to take that risk and if their security setup is adequate.

I can understand you might be apprehensive about doing that but I think it would be easier for people to donate spare server resources than it would be to donate cash. I mean the extra $3 or whatever a month for an extra IP  on my bill is going to be inconsequential.

Additionally we could all put a dedicated SFS donation button on *our* forums, and ask our members whether they like a spam-free forum, suggesting they donate to SFS.