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Hello!
I'm currently having a problem with my forum that I caused myself ...
Apparently, there was a DDoS attack on it for two days. It wasn’t a very large one, and it doesn’t seem like anyone was trying to sign up or log in, but around the clock, there were 8 to 10 times as many visitors as usual. These “visitors” all had completely different IP addresses, so I couldn’t simply block certain IP ranges.
I then decided to put the forum into maintenance mode for almost a day, hoping that would put an end to these fake visits. But I apparently did something wrong in the process.
There are apparently two ways to set maintenance mode, and I must have chosen the wrong one. In any case, the forum is now completely inaccessible via the internet. A page loading error and a “500 Internal Server Error” are displayed.
I can log into the database through my host. There, I simply restored/imported the latest backup, which I had made two days ago, hoping that the forum would be back online afterward. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s still gone.
What else can I try now? What is the correct way?

Greetings to all 

Taking a quick stab while waiting for Spuds, the first thing I'd look at is any .htaccess files in the public_html directory (or whatever the webroot folder is.) You may need to set the file manager to show hidden files. The .htaccess file is where servers often tuck IPs to be blocked, etc., and ElkArte (at least my v 1.1.6), has some config info in there as well..
I've not encountered the problem you refer to, but that's the first location I'd sniff around in to see what's there.  If no clues there hopefully Spuds (or someone else more knowledgeable than I) has a better idea..

If you can access your Settings.php file, you need to edit that so $maintenance = 0; its probably set to 2 which makes it untouchable.

Thanks for your replies. I’ll see what I can do.

I set it back to 0 in settings.php. But that didn't help.
It’s probably because I also activated maintenance mode in the forum’s administration center afterward. I probably shouldn’t have done that.   Attached are two screenshots I took while doing that (the text is in German).
Is there any way I can get back there? Right now, I don’t know how to do that, since I can’t even access the admin area.

That is strange, the admin panel only updates settings.php, it does not change anything in the database.   Are you still getting a 500 error?

Yes, the error message is still there and the forum has disappeared.

.
Any ideas on what else I could do or try?