One of our primary servers crashed. We now have the main system running on a secondary server until John repairs or replaces the one that fried. We have several servers at FR all performing various functions. Each server has its own IP address so that’s why you may now be seeing a different IP. It was not a DOS attack. Nothing nefarious. Just a hardware crash. We usually have two servers serving web pages and two serving the database and others doing various tasks. Usually a server going off line wouldn’t crash the entire system but this time it did and John had a bit of a problem getting it all running again.
Currently, freerepiblic.com (.200) works, and the fried server www.freerepublic.com (.201) is out of commission. If there is a way to tell people (on “alternative” sites?) to remove www. they won’t have to go through FR withdrawal.
If you use a front load balancer / failover switch for both servers, that may prevent “outages” for some users, but probably will slow things down since only one server will be in use until second server is back online.