Went in to restart the PHP processes (where kill -9 was required). That brought the site up for 15 minutes before it died again.

Anyway. According to our web hosting provider (where OzBargain runs on a single 4GB instance of Linux Cloud server), that they were having some issues with maintenance last night. It’s still on their hands now and at the moment we (OzBargain) can’t do anything about it.

Will update this space when there’s a solution.

Update 9:40AM AEST: Server just gets rebooted. There might still have some issues but the site is running for now.

Update 10:15AM AEST: I think everything should be operational now. We are manually sending out the daily newsletter that missed its 7AM run.

Hello

I purchased earings for my wife for Christmas following a “bargain” on your website for Cudo.com.au

The fact is after 1 month, the item is still not received. Apparently I am not the only customer to whom that happened, a few other people are in the same situation.

So I strongly suggest that you take care with the ads on your website as your responsibility could be involved too.

Emphasis mine. Probably referred to this offer here and this forum discussion. With most inquiries I usually just reply saying that OzBargain is just an online community for shoppers to discuss bargains, and they should really contact the merchants directly (in this case, Cudo.com.au).

However, as deal postings can sometimes be seen as “ads on your website” (although that was just one community member sharing a deal he/she found interesting), thus the visitor concluded that “OzBargain is in some way responsible”. IANAL but can that really be the case? “Common sense” says no, especially over a deal that wasn’t well received in the first place. However we live in a land that often defies common sense…

• It lists out all the deals, and usually only the last 10 deals posted (where we get ~50 deals posted a day).
• Only deals, and OzBargain is more than just a list of deals.
• Not much you can do with turning the look and feel.

So for the last couple of months we have been developing our own in-house email newsletter solution, which moocher announced in August. If you do not have an account on OzBargain (what?!!!), you can still sign up to the new OzBargain newsletter from the front page — the sign up box is on the right hand side under Subscribe to Our Daily Newsletter. However if you are a logged in user, you can go to Settings – newsletter for more fine tuning.

You get:

• Top deals posted over the last 24 hours.
• New forum posts
• New comments in your commented posts (registered users only)
• Deal reminders (registered user only)

Delivery started at 7AM Sydney time every morning so you can check out some of the best deals before work :)

It is still not as flexible and useful as our Facebook page yet. Moreover Google+ has been pretty vacuum currently — great place to post something guaranteeing no one is going to see it. But anyway, I am a Google fanboi so here we have it, and we’ll figure out what to do with it… Later.

I won’t call it a completely new themes though — anything between the header and the footer pretty much stayed the same. Hopefully that will give OzBargain a fresh image in preparation of up-coming Christmas shopping season.

Hopefully it wasn’t caused by me. This is now discussed in the forums. While that specific VPS has served me well over the last couple of months, I think it’s time to move on — either to Linode’s other data centres (better stability, trusted brand, higher latency, relatively cheap) or “somewhere else”.

Your website attacked!

Attention! That`s not a joke!!!

Your website is threatened by serious danger!!!

This letter is intended only for superadministrators or owners of the website!!!

Hello, dear administrators or owners of the website

http://www.ozbargain.com.au

This is AnonymousHackersGroup who speaks to you.

It happened that your website has become a target for our group. We are going to make full-size DDoS-attack of your resource. Our possibilities and means allow to do this really effective. The result of such attack will look like entire paralyses of your site (absolute inaccessibility from the internet) and it’s total physical destruction.

It’s not difficult to guess how much financial and moral blow you will get after.

But don’t despair! We are ready to forget about your existance forever, if you do one condition:

Transfer 999 PM EUR into our account E1775779 in the payment system Perfect Money :

More details you can get here: https://perfectmoney.com/index.html

We warn you: calling to the police department won’t anyway save your internet resource from distruction!!!

No measures of counteraction will help!!!

You have a choice: to pay us or to loose your site.

Attack wil be started in 3 days after you get this message and will be irreversible until your site is totally out of order. You can save your website if only you pay money.

Sincerely, AnonymousHackersGroup

Not the first time I am threatened with DDoS this year. Actually I received two massive ones back in July (not on OzBargain but my other sites) and that was certainly a traumatising experience. We’ll see — if you see OzBargain disappears tomorrow you know what’s going on.