A Small Victory

Yes, Hosting Matters was down again. Yes, it was part of a prolonged DOS attack that started a few nights ago.

How many of you have hosts who set up a remote message board for times like these, so they can give you up-to-the-second updates on the progress they are making, so you can talk back and forth with others about the situation? Hosting Matters does that, and more.

A DOS attack is not something that a host can predict, nor is it something that is preventable. Many a large site has been the victim of DOS attacks; Microsoft, Yahoo, CNN. It happens, it gets fixed and people forget about it eventually.

There are several whiny, ungrateful people over at the aforementioned message boards, complaining about their site being down, complaining about “bad” service, complaining about everything under the sun.

The ownership and management of HM have been answering the best they can, explaining in plain language what is going on and how AT&T is being unresponsive to the needs of HM and its clients. The HM staff is practically hand-holding these people through this attack, and the most some of them can do is stamp their feet and announce loudly that they are going to move to a different host, even though some of them have been with HM for years and have never experienced any trouble with them at all.

This is directed to those folks, and it something I said over at the boards: There is no host in the world that can guarantee you that their servers will never fall victim to a DOS attack. You can switch hosts all you want but the fact remains that no matter where you go, you are still vulnerable. It’s the nature of the internet. Go ahead and move. Take down your site, put it up somewhere else and see how long it takes you to find out that no one at MegaServers Hosting Company is going to hold your hand when things go wrong. No one is going to answer your help desk email within minutes, if not seconds. No one is going to walk you through things that you don’t understand. Maybe they’ll ply you with dreams of 100% uptime, but you can bet your ass you will not be paying what you pay at HM. And I would also venture a bet that your site will go down at some point. And then you will wait hours, maybe a day or longer, for someone at the help center to answer your email.

The bottom line is that this is not the fault of HM. Perhaps all your bitching and whining is making you feel better but, in essence, it’s making you look like an unappreciative jerk. I give Annette and company (especially Stacy) a lot of credit for their patience in explaining the same thing to you over and over again, even though you don’t seem to be listening or at least comprehending what they are telling you.

Also, as someone on the board said, you should not judge a hosting company by the problems it faces, but by how they respond to those problems. By that standard, HM happens to be a gold mine of a hosting company.

A DOS attack of this nature is a form of terrorism. If you leave HM, then the terrorists have won! You deserters are in serious trouble with Ashcroft and Rumsfeld!

[As for the specific site that was the target of the attack and what that site does, well....that's for another day]

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a day's worth of blogging to catch up on.