URGENT! Raising Funds for a New Platform

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 29, 2014

In the Summer of 2013, CatholicCulture.org was victimized by a hacker exploit from China which took advantage of a bug in our older software to disrupt the website. We implemented necessary upgrades on our servers, without changing the servers themselves. This enabled us to beat back the attack and keep it from happening again.

However, the new configuration was never as stable as the old one, and as our server platform aged during the course of 2014, things grew worse. CatholicCulture.org would fail occasionally under load, and this became more frequent after traffic built up again following the usual Summer slow-down.

In addition to this growing performance problem, CatholicCulture.org was subjected to a distributed denial of service attack on December 11th. A DDOS attack is one in which hackers use a large number of different computers to bombard a website with requests at such a high rate of speed that it becomes unable to respond to any ordinary users.

To solve this problem, we changed our IP address and adopted a third-party solution (CloudFlare) which receives all of our traffic, filters it, dumps the bad stuff, and sends legitimate page requests on to CatholicCulture.org. It took a few days to get all systems working under this new arrangement.

All of these measures have increased our operating costs. But note that there has never been any security breach in our online financial transactions, which are always heavily encrypted and stored on a different server entirely.

Still, even after the latest changes to our web configuration, the earlier instabilities persisted, and we have had brief outages under load. Clearly we must move everything to a new state-of-the-art server platform on which all the latest, most efficient, and most stable software can be run.

Our goal is to do this in January, but we cannot do it unless we meet all of our expenses for this current year. With three days to go, we are just $8,500 short. If we can knock this off by December 31st, we can contract for the new platform in January.

We need end-of-year donations between now and December 31st to make this important transition.

Please donate securely online now.

Or, if you need to send a check, mail it to Trinity Communications, P.O. Box 582, Manassas, VA 20108, USA. But in that case, please use our contact form to tel us you have mailed the check and how much it is for.

May God bless all those who provide financial and spiritual support for the mission of CatholicCulture.org!

Jeff Mirus
President
Trinity Communications