I Preferred When DOS Only Meant “Disk Operating System”
Why yes, we’re here. Yesterday morning? Not so much.
There was a Saudi-based denial of service (DoS) attack against Hosting Matters, where we are hosted, yesterday, lasting a few hours. I’ve seen mention that it came back for a while after 9:00 last night, but I didn’t observe that and have no idea if it’s true. There was rumor that the attack was aimed at a specific blog, then point blank denial from HM that the particular bellicose blog was the target. Be that as it may, if you go around goading a bully to punch you in the stomach as hard as he can, and the bully punches you so hard you lose your lunch all over your neighbors, don’t be surprised if your neighbors aren’t unhappy with the bully exclusively.
Anyway, this made things interesting, as I was working from home and couldn’t get work e-mails. This is going to lead to changes in how I have things configured. Any internal e-mail to me forwards to an elhide.com account I can get anywhere. That’s on HM too. Along with the business site and thecotc.com, which is supplied hosting directly by the business site, a couple of client web sites, and one client’s e-mail. My new business sites I’ve been too busy to pursue are hosted in elhide.com’s space, which meant they’d have been down too had that mattered. For me the e-mail was the main thing. The big client’s MX record points inside the building, so even as their web site was down, e-mail worked fine.
Apart from any notions I may have of diversifying my hosting, and apart from having made sure people have Gmail and Verizon e-mail addresses as backup, I think I will switch it so internal client e-mail (to clarify, my office is on their network and I am directly on their internal e-mail, which is great when I am at the office) forwards to Gmail instead. In turn, the Gmail forwards to my primary account, so it would look the same. But if elhide.com were down, I could go to Gmail and have complete continuity.
I almost went and blogged at my original backup site yesterday: InstaJay. That was meant as an “if Hosting Matters is down” backup to my old blog, but after I set it up, HM got more reliable. I may setup something else as an AV backup, but you might bookmark the one I just mentioned so if I do post “we’re down, here’s what’s happening” someone will actually see it, even if I don’t create and publicize another backup site.
Michelle Malkin took it upon herself to be the reporter of record regarding the outage. She offered to list and link all the blogs that were affected, so I sent her ours as an experiment. I guess we don’t count.
My old cell phone also chose yesterday to act up, spontaneously rebooting itself, and being found to be off completely as it sat on the charger. That made me say “well, time for the cell upgrade project like NOW,” until I discovered the back cover was loose and letting the battery disconnect randomly. Doh. I had been thinking I’d try to get a mixed-use portable web and e-mail and phone device as part of updating the cell situation, but maybe it will make more sense just to get a family plan with two or three basic phones (me and Deb, and possibly one to leave at the office), then later do something about “e-mail anywhere” (and web if possible). We’ll see. Just because it’ll officially be a business expense doesn’t mean I don’t want to do the whole thing as reasonably in cost as possible.
Okay, enough digression. This was supposed to be just an obligatory “we were down and we’re back” post. Oh, and I meant to note that from my perspective we’re loading even slower than ever, as if things atill aren’t completely right in host land. Hope that goes away.
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