The Downtime.

If you’ve been fail­ing to load tehCpeng.net for the past three days here’s why:

It’s been more than 72 hours of exhaustion.

Short story: My blog was down for more than 72 hours due to a mas­sive DDoS attack on my host. It has since been resolved and hope­fully won’t reoc­cur again. *crosses fingers*

Long story: It was Wednes­day night, 3rd Sep­tem­ber when tehCpeng.net wasn’t load­ing any­more. I reached my host via WLM and was informed of a DDoS attack on the server at 140mbps.

So began the long and exhaust­ing ride over the past few days of pes­ter­ing my host on the sta­tus and hop­ing the attacks would some­how alle­vi­ate. After 48 hours, all help­less and frus­trated, I posted a lengthy sup­port ticket rant­ing about how slow their IM sup­port seems to be reply­ing and hes­i­tat­ing to fill me in on the details.

The sup­port team made a rather quick and prompt reply, reas­sur­ing me of the sit­u­a­tion and detailed the mea­sures they’ve taken to block the attack. That calmed my frus­tra­tion a lit­tle, but the attacks went on and on yes­ter­day after­noon, 6th Sep­tem­ber, my host cited the attacks were still incom­ing at 500mbps. Bloody hell. By the time, tehCpeng.net has gone down for about three days.

Which totally sucked. I under­stand the amount of pres­sure my host is going through to get their net­work back up. But you just can’t help feel­ing frus­trated over a help­less situation.

All sorts of mea­sures were tried, includ­ing mov­ing my blog to a US-based server and yet, to no avail. The DDoS attacks were too persistent.

Fast for­ward this morn­ing, more than 72 hours after I last saw my blog, I found the attacks still ongo­ing. I checked back on a lowyat.net thread on the attacks and found that my host were updat­ing the domain IP’s one by one to pin­point which domain is the prob­lem. They updated mine and ended, rather instantly, the longest ever down­time I’ve experienced.

I can only hope that this frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence would be my last. It’s been a long week. =\

*exas­per­ated sigh*

10 thoughts on “The Downtime.”

  2. ember Post author

    @May, *pon­ders* No, I’m not! =P I’m just wor­ried that my blog would never see the light of day again. =\

    @Eli James, you have no idea. =(

    Well, ASO plans are a bit costly. I did con­sider going for them, but I set­tled for a local host­ing com­pany because (1) it’s cheaper and (2) I fig­ured my blog would have a major­ity of local readers.

    But the thing is any host­ing com­pany would’ve suf­fered if some­one were to launch a mas­sive DDoS attack on them.

    As to why any­body would do that.. I have NO idea. =\

  4. ember Post author

    It is seri­ous. DDoS attack stands for a Dis­trib­uted Denial of Ser­vice attack.

    A DDoS attack occurs when some­one mali­ciously floods servers with huge amounts of data, over­load­ing the server and ren­der­ing it useless.

    As a result, when peo­ple try to access a site on the server, it fails to respond and thus, the user would receive an error that the site is down.

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