so, what happened?
You may have noticed that quite a few blogs were down for the count last night.
Hosting Matters - the hosting company of choice for fine bloggers everywhere - was the victim of a massive Denial of Service attack.
HM was right on the ball, doing everything they could to slow down and/or stop the attack. They immediately put up an off-site message board where they updated users on the status of the attack and answered questions.
Apparently, the attack was aimed at one particular site - a pro-Israeli site. You do the math. There's an investigation into the whole thing and I hope they catch the bastards.
If you want to see what a DOS attack looks like, go here.
Comments
This is why I use eHostPros.
Posted by: J | October 17, 2003 08:56 AM
J, every host is vulnerable to a DOS attack. DOS attacks have even brought down sites like CNN and Yahoo.
Hosting Matters was responsive, professional and helpful in every way during the loss of services.
Posted by: michele | October 17, 2003 09:09 AM
There will always be some, Michele, who believe we were underprepared or whatever. They're welcome to believe as they wish, but seeing as they themselves do not run hosting companies, I'm much more inclined to listen to those who do.
Posted by: Sekimori | October 17, 2003 09:29 AM
Is no one going to mention the name of the "target site"? Sounds like it might be an interesting site and I'd like to give them some new hits.
Posted by: Ken Summers | October 17, 2003 09:49 AM
Not at this time, no. An investigation is under way. That site will be moved to another network entirely, away from our main presence at Peak10. This is not a penalty of that site owner, merely the best solution for all involved.
Posted by: Sekimori | October 17, 2003 10:17 AM
Thanks for posting what happened. By the time Ching told me my site was down and I got up to check it, it was fixed. So far I've been impressed with Hosting Matters.
Posted by: Beth | October 17, 2003 10:33 AM
Me too. Once I ran a trace on the server I knew there was either a backbone failure or they turned down.
Even though I had the unhappy experience of hosts turning down, packing up in the night and sneaking off with my prepay...one even had the balls to hit my credit card for another prepay!... I didn't consider that HM lammed for a second. I did however lament that my backups were two weeks old. ;-)
I moved to HM mainly because of Michele and Sekimori...they know their shit. I have nothing but mad props for HM...the user interface is friendly and tech support is awesome.
Posted by: feste | October 17, 2003 01:28 PM
The site that received the DDOS is not exactly secret, in fact they're looking for donations to co-locate to avoid this in the future. (Although b/c mum seems to be the word here, I'll not mention it) My understanding is that the PURPOSE of the site was not as much pro-israel as anti-muslim extremist -- they had been getting hosts and DNSs to drop sites promoting Jihad and Terrorism, hence the DDOS.
As for J's comment, this is an example of why someone SHOULD host with HostingMatters -- unless you're going to find a host that refuses to host controversial sites, no host is safe and HostingMatters handled the DDOS spectacularly well.
Posted by: Pete | October 17, 2003 03:26 PM
We like Pete. :)
Posted by: Sekimori | October 17, 2003 04:19 PM
So that's what happened. I couldn't get on most of my favorite sites.
Posted by: alfredo stroessner | October 17, 2003 08:43 PM