Denial of Service, What’s It Like? (Under Attack! 2/16/2010)

(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

I’ve been watching Website In A Weekend melt down. It’s not been pleasant. Here’s a few notes.

• Bluehost customer service has been pretty good through the whole fiasco. I’m going to continue recommending Bluehost as a result. No one is immune from denial of service attacks. If you’re on shared hosting, your risk is much higher. No accounting for your neighbors.

  The account which is being attacked has been disabled by Bluehost. Being subject to DDOS is a violation of their terms of service. Unfortunately, nobody told the botnet, which continues to spew packets at the server.

• Google is going to love this:
  

  I’m sure none of these are really broken, they’re being reported broken as a result of timing out.

• Try running your website with comments… without Akismet:
  
• I’ll be switching to Feedblitz while all this is going on. Feedburner and CommentLuv don’t get along, Feedblitz and CommentLuv work really well together. It’s as good a time as any to make the switch.
• The attacker takes a high value good (your website), and turns it into junk. Now you have to do even more work, and spend more money, just to stay even with where you were.
• Saving a little post like this one takes about 10 minutes.

A denial of service attack is a little bit like a bank robbery, where your deposit isn’t insured.

Point to ponder: what would happen to an economy if bank robbery were tolerated?