The Web site had been experiencing growing pains over the past few months.

Ben Trott, co-founder and CTO of Six Apart, said in an October blog entry that the company outgrew its original data center and has recently moved over to a new facility.

"We've seen failures in our storage servers, failures that we had never seen before. We've seen a failure in a piece of networking equipment that had never failed before, and so on, ranging from hardware failures to software failures," she said in the October entry.

Trott wrote that the company is currently pushing about 3TB a day of network traffic through multiple pipes, "and that's growing by 10-20 percent each month."

Because of the problems, the company also offered its customers as much as 45 days of free service.