my webhost was DDoSed

[Daniel Pfeffer]

raddevus wrote:

Is there just no way to escape this if bad actors decide to attack?

Not really. Your website is a sitting target (if your legitimate clients can find you, so can the black hats). A black hat with enough motivation could assemble a DDoS botnet large enough to bring down almost any site. Assuming that your site is hosted on a commercial server, there is nothing that you can do in mitigation. There are techniques that can be used by the web hosts, but whether they are used depends on the size of their operation, the availability guarantee (e.g. 3 nines or 99.9% is approx. 8.75 hours of downtime a year), etc. Basically, you pays your money and you takes your choice.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.

[Mike Hankey]

I've been with WinHost for a few years now and haven't had any problems with them.

The less you need, the more you have. Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally. JaxCoder.com

[obermd]

Not much you can do about this. We've seen DDoS attacks take down huge numbers of web-sites over the past few years. DDoS is the easiest attack to perform but one of the hardest to defend against as it's all about volume on the attacker's side and redundancy on the victim's side.

[raddevus]

Good to know. I will most likely move. I had moved to smarterasp.net about 7 years ago (moved from godaddy for similar reasons). I guess I just keep hopping (and hoping). :rolleyes: Thanks,

[Mike Hankey]

The problem is there was at one time, don't know whether they're still around a company that bought up successful sites and ruined them. I was with a company a long time and this company bought them oput and within 2 months it turned to shi..I bailed!

The less you need, the more you have. Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally. JaxCoder.com

[dandy72]

obermd wrote:

it's all about volume on the attacker's side and redundancy on the victim's side

^ This. If you *have* to stay online - you pretty much have to ignore the mom and pop shops--they *will* go down. Attacks have been measured in Tbps for quite a while now.

[RobertSF]

I wouldn't call a move every seven years "hopping." :-D Anyway, unless your sites are extremely critical and you can move them before the attack is over, consider waiting a day or two. If the attack was random, just for the lulz, what are the chance they'll hit this site again? You wouldn't want to move and then it's your new hosts turn to get DDoSed two weeks later! :laugh:

[HobbyProggy]

If they wanna bomb you out of the net they do, renting botnets is cheap as f and your server / hoster / provider can't basically do anything against it.

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[DerekT P]

If you're really desperate to minimise downtime but can't run to ultra-robust providers, then you can mitigate the issue by hosting a backup site on another hosting provider. Keep your DNS nameservers on a 3rd service (preferably with alternative nameservers hosted in different locations). If/when your primary site goes down you can update your nameservers to point to your alternative host. This only works if you can define the nameservers with a short TTL (Time to Live) otherwise the DNS change takes longer to propagate than the DDoS attack (or other outage) lasts. You need to be on the ball and trigger the DNS change as soon as you spot the outage, so you'll need some monitoring software (hosted somewhere else again) to notify you of any issues. And of course you'll need to keep both sites up-to-date, and if there's a database involved either do regular or real-time syncs, or host it somewhere else again (preferably with a backup host for that too). All in all it's a lot of faff and effort, you might get your site up and running a couple of hours before the attack ends (you might not), and you'll be paying double what you need to for your hosting - for maybe 6 hours' of extra uptime a year. Your choice!

[Dan Neely]

And of course it will only partially work because some of your users will have providers who ignore your short TTL values and cache for much longer anyway Because Reasons(tm).

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius