Huhhh. The Lieberman website still has a pretty flat accusation up 
on their site claiming that their “political opponents” hacked their website and calls on Ned Lamont to “make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately.” But our reporting on this throughout the day at Election Central and TPMmuckraker raises real question about whether any hacking even took place at all. And Lamont’s campaigned categorically denied having anything to do with it.
What really blows me away though is that Paul Kiel got Lieberman’s Internet consultant Dan Geary to concede that Lieberman was apparently running his whole website on an off-the-rack amateur web host account. The sort of thing you might use if you were posting pictures of the grand kids. Geary told Kiel the account the campaign used cost “a bit more” than $15 a month.
So, what? $25 a month? $50 tops?
Now, I know a bit about running websites on the cheap. I ran this one on a shoestring for the first three years TPM was online — though even then when I was scraping enough for food and rent I was still paying more money than the Lieberman camp apparently was. And the thing is when you have that kind of account you really don’t get enough information from the provider to have any clear idea what happened if your site goes down. And you certainly have no guarantee it can hold up under any kind of serious traffic — especially not the kind these sites were going to get in the last 48 hours.
I don’t know if they got hacked or caught under a crush of traffic. But from what we know it seems clear they were doing the equivalent of running their Internet camp with the equivalent of a bicycle when they needed an 18-wheeler.
