My website recently encountered a Spam Bot attack that brought the site down several times because of excessive CPU and bandwidth usage.  The number of page requests increased 33 times more than normal from an average of 54,000 to over 1.8 million. Many thanks to my web host (www.mainehost.com) for all their help and support to foil the Bots and getting my site back online.  I took three steps to solve the problem; 1) required all users to register and login in order to access any website content, 2) require a CAPTCHA response when adding article comments, 3) upgrade the site from Joomla 2.5.17 to Joomla 3.3.6 .

I was quite surprised how simple and seamless the Joomla 3.3.6 upgrade was.  The upgrade took less than an hour and that included a test installation.  After upgrading to Joomla 3.3.6 I had to upgrade the site template and one component. The Joomla 3.x administration is a significant improvement over Joomla 2.5 and I strongly recommend anyone who has not yet upgraded to do so.  I also like the fact that Joomla 3.x supports two factor authentication which I plan to rollout shortly to improve security even further.