Not Cuill (pronounced ‘cool’)

So yesterday I had some issues accessing my site here, and my photo site. I was getting internal server errors, or finally after four-five minutes of trying, the page would load. These were the only sites of the number of sites I host that seemed to be having a problem…. which led me to believe it wasn’t really a sever issue per se.

After trading a couple emails with the folks at Dreamhost, they helped me track down what may have been the problem, my photos site was getting hit with an unusually high number of connections. Three IP addresses were responsible for nearly 3000 connections to my photo gallery yesterday. 74.6.8.100 had 389 connections, 65.55.212.161 had 720, and 64.1.215.162 had a whopping 1724!

Using the handy-dandy Network Tools in Ubuntu to do a traceroute, I discovered the first one belonged to Yahoo, the second seems to be MSN related, and the third traced back to crawl-6.cuill.com - so a quick visit over to cuill.com was in order. That’s where I found this in big bold letters… (oddly enough as an image)

Cuill Inc. (pronounced “cool”) is a startup company that is pioneering a new approach to Search. The company was founded by Tom, Anna and Russell. Our offices are located on a quiet street in Menlo Park, Ca. If you’d like to learn more about Cuill or the people behind it, please get in touch.

Ok, fine. Yet another search engine. One that you can’t even search with yet. Whatever. I appreciate that they’re interested in my sites, but c’mon - do you have to be so aggressive about it that you basically take my lowly little site down for a few hours? That’s not cool, no matter how you spell it. And the cutsie logo…? eh.

I figure since I have the random-photo thing here that pulls from the photo site, that’s why it was affecting this site too. So, for anyone trying to get here yesterday, sorry about that.

I did drop them an email about this earlier tonight asking how to prevent this in the future, but haven’t heard back. Likely won’t hear back before Monday. We’ll see. And no, I’m not providing any direct links back to them, if you want to check it out, you can figure out how I’m sure.

Side note: If you do happen to click over to Dreamhost and sign up, drop in promo code ‘upmykilt’ and get $50 off your initial billing… just cause I’m nice like that. Oh, and I get 40-some bucks in credit to my own account.