We know that over the past months our website hasn’t been the fast and reliable experience you expect from us. Many of you have encountered slow load times, error messages, or inaccessibility.
We hear you, we apologize for the frustration, and we want to explain exactly what is happening and what we are doing to fix it.
Since its relaunch in 2016, lcnme.com has been hosted at our facility on a dedicated server and managed by us in house. This has helped us keep costs down, but does not allow for rapid changes to emerging threats or to increase resources when traffic spikes.
Especially over the past several months, our website has been experiencing significant disruption due to a surge in malicious bot traffic. These automated bots are not real customers; rather, they are aggressive, non-human scripts designed to scan, scrape, or overwhelm site resources.
This surge has exposed a critical bottleneck: our aging hardware infrastructure. While our old infrastructure served us well for years, it was not built to handle the sheer volume and sophistication of modern, persistent bot attacks. When these bots attack, they hog server resources, leaving no room for real visitors — readers like you — to access the site.
We are not sitting idle. Behind the scenes, we have been blocking overly aggressive traffic but it is a challenge with our hardware. We have been working on getting a new firewall in place to assist with this and have a new updated server that we are working to bring online to help with these challenges.
We are also evaluating options for the best partner for our long-term growth and success in the digital landscape. One challenge is the sheer costs of hosting a website that has our level of traffic, especially since we have been keeping these costs low through self-hosting for so long.
The digital landscape is changing, and bot traffic is an unfortunate reality of the modern internet. Our goal is not just to fix the current slowdown but to upgrade our foundation to make our site faster, more secure, and more reliable than before.
We appreciate your patience, your loyalty, and your feedback. We are committed to making this right and bringing you a better experience soon.
