The Web site, http://www.joe2006.comexternal link, has been unavailable since Monday afternoon. Lieberman campaign manager Sean Smith suggested that the campaign of the senator's primary opponent, Ned Lamont, or his supporters were responsible for the disruption.
"This type of dirty politics has been a staple of the Lamont campaign from the beginning, from the nonstop personal attacks to the intimidation tactics and offensive displays to these coordinated efforts to disable our Web site," said Smith in a statement e-mailed to reporters Monday evening.
"There is no place for these Rovian tactics in Democratic politics, and we demand that our opponent call off his supporters and their online attack dogs."
Tuesday afternoon, the Lieberman campaign formally complained to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, asking him to investigate attacks on the site.
Daily Kos has been all over it, however:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/8/153827/3493
Two posts down it's clear that Lieberman's website isn't suffering from a Denial of Service attack.
But now I have the definitive answer as to why Lieberman's site went down.
They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients.
Here's the deal -- you get what you pay for. My hosting bill is now over $7K per month. A smaller site doesn't need that much bandwidth, but if you're paying $15 because your $12 million campaign is too freakin' cheap to pay for quality hosting, then don't go blaming your opponent when your shitty service goes out.
For their part, the Lamont campaign has offered its technical expertise to get Lieberman's site back up (which could be done in an hour by a competent sysadmin), and has added a link to the googlecached version of Lieberman's site at the top of their blog.
One side is acting mature, the other is running around making baseless accusations.
Update: Dan Gerstein, Lieberman spokesperson, admits they have no evidence Lamont's campaign or his supporters are behind their website woes.
I'm telling you, it's down because they were too cheap to pay for quality hosting. That's a lesson to all of you campaigns skimping on hosting. $15 won't cut it.
Update II: Joe's site shares one server with 73 other sites. They pay $15/month for an overcrowded server, and then they blame others when it goes down? Full list of sites on Joe's server on the flip.
More here:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/8/181016/9275
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/8/171512/6117
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/8/15948/78690