Site Back Up

 

Site Back Up

by admin on Jul.12, 2009, under admin

Well, it’s been an interesting couple of days.

I got home from work on Wednesday, and then the next day I was checking my email.  There was a note from my web hosting service saying that my site had been locked for using too much bandwidth.  I thought this was a little odd, in that they advertise unlimited bandwidth and storage.

So I call them up, and when I explain the note, the customer service guy looks at my account, and gets very quiet.  Then he says… “Oh, it looks like you’ve been the victim of a Denial of Service Attack, I’ll have to transfer you to the abuse department”
He tries to transfer me, but I end up getting dropped into a quality of service survey (guess you know how they rated!).  So I call back and get the same guy, and he is successful at transferring me on the second attempt.

The second person I talked to was even more rude than the first.  He said I had had more than 1000 hits per minute about 1-1/2 hours prior to my call.  The admin person had locked the website down, and I would have to move my websites to a different hosting service.

What?? You mean someone supposedly attacks my site, and you’re kicking Me off??
Yes, unfortunately, if someone decides to target your site, there is nothing you nor anyone else can do about it.
But I paid for 3 years of service…
You will receive a refund after the service is terminated.  You can access your files to download them in order to move to a different host.

Man, I feel dirty…

I did download all of my files and databases, and eventually moved to another hosting service.  From searching the internet, it seems that this is the standard way of handling these situations.  It is much easier than disabling the site for, oh say 30 minutes, or even a day, then trying a second time, in case the first was just a fluke. Or even setting a rule in their firewall to block the attacker…

I did look through my logs, and I’m pretty sure this was not a denial of service attack.  It appeared to be a misbehaving web client from some poor soul in New Jersey.  He was just browsing my ham radio site, www.wb0smx.net , when all of the sudden his mediapc went crazy repeatedly asking for the same file over and over.  All 3 of my sites are really benign, in that I don’t put anything controversial on them.  They are just information, so nobody really has a reason to specifically target my sites for attacks.

So anyway, here I am.  Back in service after a couple of days of relatively hard work to restore everything.  Hope it doesn’t happen again…

1 comments for this entry:
  1. WB0WHO
    July 13th, 2009 on 4:53 am

    Wow, I wondered what happened! Glad your back up.

    John

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