They are always on about needing donations to upgrade the server, it would explain the really slow response time you get clicking on links here sometimes. My guess is they were either upgrading a component or the old system is finally starting to give them troubles.
I thought the same thing... Maybe the DEA is downloading user information from the servers. But as a webmaster, I know several issues can cause a website to go offline. Notice the hours of the day..It usually shuts down at night- a popular time of day to update databases and code to webservers. I actually have two servers- a production server and a test server. We work on the test server which is identical to the production server. When all work is done, we just transfer the files to the production server, and voila. The site is fixed or updated without ever going down.
Another issue why the site goes down (and more unlikely), is the bandwidth overload. Websites, whether they own a server or rent space from a company's server, they are limited to a certain amount of bandwidth. If the rollitup users upload and download enough pages and pictures to exceed the badwidth rate, then the webmaster must either shut down or pay for the additional bandwidth.
Here's the rub...You can be paying $100/mo for bandwidth, and if there's an overload oin that bandwidth, the cost to the webmaster could jump from $100/mo to $20k/mo. It can happen overnight, so many datacenters will shut down a server if a client doesn't have the money or credit to cover the bandwidth. For my bandwidth, I pay $100/mo for about 2mb bandwidth per month, which breaks down to about 200GB up/down traffic. Uploading a 100MB file costs me 100MB oif bandwidth. Everytime that image loads on someone's browser, I'm charged another 100MB. And on and on and on... You can see how it adds up.
So I would say Gov't involvement is unlikely.
I hate the damn response time, seems a little quicker though, maybe they upgraded.
