Recent Outage

[GB2000]

My apologies for the recent outage lasting much of this afternoon... our host was the victim of a DDos (Distributed Denial of Service) attack which took down the site until the attack stopped.

Thank the computer crackers for the outage!

[Southern Wolf]

What I would like to do to them would have to be posted on the porch.

[GB2000]

Must apologize for the recent outage again this evening... while surfing HF, the database suddenly went down. The databases on both of my sites were giving me all sorts of weird errors. Our host apparently screwed something up...and rather than fixing it...they left us all hanging (how nice of them, huh?).

I submitted a support ticket and received no response yet...so I began searching. Found a post on their forums with someone having the same problems. Somebody was smart enough to figure out a fix...played with it a little bit and I was nice enough to have the site back online before I hit the sack

Anyway...sorry...I sure don't intend for this to become a regular occurrence.

[spirals]

What are we in Iraq? This happens entirely too often.

[Southern Wolf]

Last time it happened our Hosting company was under attack from hackers. Cant blame the hosting company for that one.

[GB2000]

Yeah, last time they were victims of a DDoS attack...which typically involves multiple crackers and thousands of machines all programmed to attack the server. It's dang near impossible to trace all the machines back and shut them down unlike a typical DoS attack which is only one machine so the most they can do is shut the servers down and wait for the attack to end...if they leave the servers up, the attack can wipe out all their bandwidth and cause them to have to purchase extra to keep the servers online...which is pointless when they're so bogged down from the attack that they're either throwing 'Page Cannot be Found' errors or they've just slowed to a crawl.

[chris_tal2004]

Something similar happened to the dog site Im on... They're still not up. =(

The last time this site was down, theirs was down for a couple of days.

[Southern Wolf]

We've got a really good hosting company.... and they are on top of things. They may be a bit more expensive than some of the others out there.... but they are worth it.

[GB2000]

I wanna kick em in the nuts at the moment...they took my sites down by making some kind of change that caused stuff to go down and not notifying me that I was going to need to make some changes to bring that stuff back online. If it was done in error...they didn't fix it or post anywhere on the server status page that they were having problems and to be patient...and they still haven't replied to my support ticket.

I'm just glad that someone on their forums figured out how to resolve the issues so I was able to get the site back online...or we'd most likely still be down.

[GB2000]

I got a reply to my support ticket finally, apologizing for the issues...apparently they had updated PHP on their servers and it screwed up a bunch of software utilizing php and he looked over the site and made sure all my issues were resolved...which they were. So we're good to go!