I noticed that the site was suffering a 500 server error message for approximately 6 hours.
The problem to my knowledge wasn't caused by any attacks (I had a look through the logs) it actually appears that the company I pay for the webspace must have been doing an update to some of the software in the back-end.
They've done this before and it tends to cause slight but extremely significant changes when it effects the front-end.
After a while I was able to get in and fix what I assume was causing a bug (although it hadn't previously been causing a bug.)
In any event it's back up now.
Update:
It appeared again yesterday, so the above might well not be the reason.
I've analysed the logs further and found one particular spider misbehaving. It's now banned and if is the cause, shouldn't cause the problem again in the future. I have an idea as to why it occurred but for security reasons I can't be forthcoming about it.
The problem to my knowledge wasn't caused by any attacks (I had a look through the logs) it actually appears that the company I pay for the webspace must have been doing an update to some of the software in the back-end.
They've done this before and it tends to cause slight but extremely significant changes when it effects the front-end.
After a while I was able to get in and fix what I assume was causing a bug (although it hadn't previously been causing a bug.)
In any event it's back up now.
Update:
It appeared again yesterday, so the above might well not be the reason.
I've analysed the logs further and found one particular spider misbehaving. It's now banned and if is the cause, shouldn't cause the problem again in the future. I have an idea as to why it occurred but for security reasons I can't be forthcoming about it.