August 29th 2014 Outage

[VirusZero]

Yesterday our site was knocked offline several times throughout the day.

As you can see from our

Spoiler:

The cause of this outage was a sustained DDoS attack on our host. (DDoS attacks are when multiple computers/servers all flood one server with requests, taking up valuable resources to stop legitimate users from accessing.) The unfortunate aspect is that DDoS attacks are incredibly difficult to deal with. And they're ridiculously cheap and easy to launch. They're such an issue that even large companies like Sony and Microsoft can be brought down by them. (And they have thousands of servers with terabytes, if not petabytes or exabytes, of bandwidth.)

Now for some sad news...
The fact is that this issue isn't going to go away. This is something that is likely to keep happening. Moving servers or hosts isn't going to help us either since other hosts are likely to be DDoSed also (and there really isn't much they can do to stop it either). All this will do is create needless work, cost and downtime as I transfer hosts.

And while there are DDoS protection services they tend to be:
- rather expensive (upwards of $100 per month for an entry level plan, which can often be overwhelmed fairly quickly).
- not always effective against attack (strong DDoS attacks can still shut down the network).
- error prone (if their network goes down for any reason... so does our site).