Here is what my ISP, Charlie at silentcircuit.com, has to say about the reason for
the downtime that kept Expecting Rain off the air from Wednesday May 19
until Wednesday May 26, 2004:

A week ago I was DDOS attacked like crazy as you know, the provider shut
down my server IPs to save themselves from the attacks.  

The first day the DDOS attacks started we pinpointed it to an ISP in New
Jersey, we were getting 10 million HTTP requests per seconds, the same
as if 10 million people were visiting the site all at once every second.

When we got that taken care of we thought it was over until the next
morning when we got DDOS attacks from Norway, France, and China.  We
were peaking at over 100 million requests per second and our Provider
and our Provider's Provider were being taken down due to this.

I switched IPs and the attacks moved with me.  So I had to find what
client they were directed too.  Found them, then removed them and
pointed their domain to a new host. The attacks stopped, once again I
had to switch IPs, which caused some failures on the machine. I then
realized that the machine needed some major updates with the kernel, the
kernel was over 2 years old and had many security vulnerabilities.  I
brought in an expert to help me update the kernel.  Well it was too old
to update, so we had to completely wipe the OS off of the machine and
reinstall it.  Well this all happened yesterday and when I got the
machine up and running perfectly this morning after not sleeping the
last 3 days and working straight to fix everything the domains were not
resolving.  So it took us 3 hours to find out that the provider still
had the old IPs in the routing table in their router.  So now its all
fixed and great and we are all happy!! :)