I believe they didn't quite understand what was going on.
Since your site was under heavy attack by a botnet, the malicious requests were being blocked by Admin Tools. The last thing that was running on each page before Joomla! closed the connection was indeed Admin Tools. It is supposed to do that: it detects the attack and prevents Joomla! from loading anything further. However, if you are under a heavy attack and no matter what you do you will end up exceeding the resource limits your host has allocated to your site.
To make things perfectly clear: using Admin Tools allows your site to operate FOR A LONGER TIME before your host kills it due to excessive resource usage. If you didn't have Admin Tools your site would be dead much earlier for the same reason.
Your host assumed that the problem was Admin Tools when, in fact, the problem was hundreds or thousands of bots trying to access your site at the same time. Disabling Admin Tools has nothing to do with your site being unavailable yesterday. It's simple. If you have five cashiers which can serve 20 clients per hour each then your establishment can serve up to 100 clients per hour. If 1000 people arrive within an hour you can't serve them and you'll have to deny them access. The problem in this case is definitely not the bouncer at the door carding the people trying to get inside. It's precisely the same thing with web servers substituting "cashiers" with "server threads" and "bouncer" with "Admin Tools".
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!
