combatentropy
Veteran
The last time it was down for me, in which it just gets stuck on the splash page, I used the Chrome Developer Tools to inspect the request. The web server gives a status code of 503 - Service Unavailable. This means that the box itself, the operating system, and Apache (the web-serving software) are all up. This error will also be recorded in the Apache access logs, if the admins care to look for a pattern. Something further up the stack may be causing the outage, like the PHPBB software. Or the server may be under too heavy a load. With modern hardware, a virtual server for just $5 a month should be able to handle several hundred requests per second, but maybe a burst of requests from bots could exceed that for a short time period. Apache lets you block certain IP addresses or ranges thereof. So you could look for and then block the bots. I'm just guessing that's the problem though.