Problems with the availability of the website www.akademiaducha.pl

Problems with the availability of the website www.akademiaducha.pl

As you may have noticed, there have been many days in the past week when access to our website has been restricted or blocked.

You probably thought that the reason was some kind of restriction due to the political situation in the East?

No. Fortunately, neither Putin nor the Chinese leader attacked us. We've been stabbed in the back by… Western media companies including Google, Meta, AOL, MSN, and more.

We are happy to tell you this story.

Well, traffic to the site comes primarily from two sources: from your users and from search engine indexing engines that are constantly crawling the web to collect an index of what information is available on what page, so - when you ask a search engine for a topic - you get the latest links to pages with the information you ask about. This is how search engines work: they crawl the web in the background to provide search results when requested.

Your traffic on the Spirit Academy website hasn't changed much, it's about the same, sometimes a little more sometimes less. The level of stress that comes with this when browsing the website is not an issue here.

Also, the usual search queries from search engines needed to properly index the content on the Spirit Academy website will not be a problem. They wouldn't exist, but they did. Search engines that used to crawl the akademiaducha.pl site began to massively increase the number of requests. This massively means hundreds of thousands of requests or millions.

The constant, notorious queries about the content of individual subpages go far beyond the need to collect information about the content contained on the indexed page.

This excessive and habitual page request for the same content over and over again created a load that got bigger and bigger. We recently received alerts from our hosting provider about a problem and tried to fix it by blocking excessive download traffic from crawling the site. We updated all plugins, conducted a security audit.

At first, the hosting provider helped us reduce the number of unwanted scans, but at some point they found that this was a good time to earn extra money.

Referring to the provisions of one of the clauses of the hosting regulations, he disabled the site, demanding a significant increase in its parameters. Of course, the increase in parameters is associated with an increase in commissions. It can be said that even significant ...

It just so happened that website hosting services were paid for many months in advance, and we were not ready to switch to other more expensive services, both due to finances and due to a change in legal form, which currently makes it impossible ( temporarily) to perform certain administrative and tax actions. Well, an unfortunate coincidence.

In general, we have no complaints against the provider hosting the site, formally it acted in accordance with the service regulations and initially even supported us in solving the problem, but, you see, the economic incentives turned out to be stronger. We are a little sorry that the economic argument has won. In the end, we probably came to some kind of agreement with the service provider, but it will cost a lot more money. The case should find its conclusion in the coming days. On the technical side, the website hosting service has been correct so far and we would not like to change the service provider.

There is another general aspect. It would be nice if you knew about it.

For some time - the last few months the site has been under the overall control of the person who was its creator and founder. Anya Sokolovskaya. As a result, the Spirit Academy store becomes the Vibracja store.

And it will not be connected with the side of the Spiritual Academy. At the moment, there is a smooth and somewhat slow separation process.

This is also the reason why the Spirit Academy website has to support itself for many months, it cannot use the support generated by the store, which has become a separate organization. This made it difficult to resolve website accessibility issues quickly. We hope that all activities will be successful.

When we talk about finances, I would like to mention that maintaining something like Spirit Academy is not free. After all, the costs that were incurred in the past for the entire scope of services provided exceeded PLN 100.000 per year. The measures taken to reduce costs and keep them under control proved to be effective and thoughtful. Increasing the cost of hosting will not make life easier for us. Because you should know that these are not only website hosting costs, domain maintenance costs, SSL certificate costs, but also costs for hosting video files and other content. Maintenance and other costs are also an important consideration.

We assume that the content you share should not be interrupted by advertisements (any advertisements, and especially those over which we have no influence), therefore we do not monetize the content of Videos on Youtube and other media. Just out of respect for you, we don't want you to be bombarded with advertisements for poisonous drugs, toxic bank loans, or other services or products that we consider immoral or harmful by watching you.

On the other hand, we do not want to ask, we do not want to ask you for support in the form of fashionable collections of late on other sites. What will happen in the future is hard to say. However, we believe that we will succeed because we feel that what we are doing, and what has been done so far, has value for you.

So what do we want to support the site and all sites from? From paid content content that we publish in addition to free content. So you can help us. You can find a list of all our saved seminars at this link:

By purchasing access to webinars, you not only support us, but also invest in your own development.

Yes, we know it doesn't look good at the moment, but we are working on making it not look like an early IT FTP site 😉

Returning to technical issues. What should I do to prevent the blocking situation from happening again?

Theoretically, we know how to do this in order to provide 4-5 data centers on 3 continents with automatic rerouting in case of failure. We know how to automatically replicate content from a repository server under our control. We know how to deal with it, but…we probably won't, as it would cost too much.

When we discuss the causes of recent problems, we must clearly understand that the blow has come to us from a direction from which we did not expect it, and at a time when it is financially difficult for us.

Of the 10 attacks that concern us the most, eight came from within the United States.

You can check this:

66.249.66.93 USA

216.244.66.248 USA

66.249.66.94 USA

40.77.167.22 USA

207.46.13.74 USA

207.46.13.124 USA

157.55.39.199 USA

157.55.39.23 USA

And out of the 100 most attacking IPs, there was neither Chinese, nor Russian, nor Belarusian. Draw your own conclusions.

Fighting this type of attack is not easy, because blocking these specific IP numbers or specific domain names associated with them led to a switch to the attack from other new numbers. And any more drastic approach to blocking an attack could result in you being adversely affected by the cyber defenses you have put in place. That is why we have decided to partly give up and we have to bear the economic cost of maintaining the website.

 What are our plans for the site in the near future?

We want to create a subpage where you can easily access videos, we understand that at the moment finding the videos you want can be problematic.

Another project is Anya's personal blog. Thanks to him, you will be able to establish closer contact with the founder and ancestor of the Academy of the Spirit.