There’s been a lot of speculation as to what happened to the joe2006.com website. DailyKos provides lots of technical information, some of which I’ll address.

It appears as though joe2006.com was DoS’d this morning, hit with a huge influx of traffic, or both. All 74 websites (reg. wall) on the joe2006.com server were unreachable, including the company joe2006.com appears to be hosted with: myhostcamp.com.  Myhostcamp.com rents one server from The Planet.  I contacted The Planet this morning and they wouldn’t disclose any more information.

The joe2006.com server is running cPanel 10, which explains why Rob of DailyKos found a lot of open ports.  The “Suspended Account” page that many saw could have been triggered not only by a delinquent bill: over-usage of bandwidth and over-usage of storage are other possibilities. To my knowledge, cPanel displays the same page by default, no matter the cause.

Joe2006.com was setup by Dan Geary who has an e-mail address at Hotmail and no discernable website. Likely, someone in the Lieberman camp knew Geary to be “technical” and someone who could help out.  I’ve never heard of myhostcamp and I’ve been working with websites and website providers a long time, making it possible that Geary personally knows, or is even involved with, the myhostcamp.com hosting company.

While it’s possible that someone actually hacked joe2006.com, from what I’ve seen, this seems to be the least likely option. More likely, this whole episode started last night with a simple over-usage of bandwidth. In the rush to get the server back up, a temporary site using minimal bandwidth was likely uploaded — “Vote for Who You Know, Vote Joe.”  I looked at the source code on this particular page, and it didn’t appear to be coded by a hacker — the code was much too fancy. (Who ever heard of a W3C-compliant hacker?)  Probably, the page was put together in DreamWeaver or FrontPage. My instinct tells me FrontPage since cPanel can be setup with FrontPage Extensions. (Nevermind that a hacker would be more likely to say something obnoxious about or denigrating of Lieberman.)

Because joe2006.com appeared to have been hacked (a sensible guess when the site went down on election eve), bandwidth problems were complicated by the ensuing deluge of hits, finally bringing down the entire server this morning. Drudge links and heavy traffic tend to do this when there isn't a backup plan in place.  The site has been up and down ever since.

As for a staged operation, that seems unlikely given all of the above. This looks to be simply the work of an inexperienced technical consultant, but that’s just my guess.