What are your thoughts on this from our website provider/host?

[Ben_Stanton]

Dear Customer

 

On Saturday afternoon we experienced an intermittent DDOS attack which resulted in some of our websites experiencing slow load times.

 

Our technical team were notified straight away and received a number of alerts regarding large increases in connections and traffic to the sites.

 

As soon as this was identified as a DDOS attack we implemented fail safe measures to ensure that the impact of the attack was kept to a minimum which resulted those sites affected being unavailable for 20-40 minutes. We apologise for any inconvenience caused however this remains our only tool in mitigating this type of attack.

 

________________________

 

Moving forwards, although we have already put in place measures to counter an attack (which were used yesterday), they do still have these downtime implications of up to an hour. So as DDOS attacks are becoming more frequent and the perpetrators untraceable, we therefore want to be able to provide all of our clients with the option of protection against DDOS (likely to cost around £500 per annum) that will avoid any kind of downtime. We would therefore like to gauge initial demand for this service. Please email blahblah if this is therefore of interest, along with any questions you might have.

 

Kind regards

 

Support Team

Edited January 14, 2014 by Ben_Stanton

[creese]

Give us your money, or your dog gets it.

 

Who are they????

[Ben_Stanton]

Naughty isn't it. We can't afford to adequately protect our servers so can you please pay for it. I should add, since this email (sent in October) they have also emailed to say it's happened again (last week). Poor show if you ask me.

 

I'd rather not name and shame the people that did our schoolwebsite...

[sonofsanta]

Yeah, stuff that. That's what they should be doing anyway. A cynical man might wonder if the DDoS attack would trace back to the same office block...

 

We had an offer once from a software company to take out insurance against them collapsing - pay this money, the code will be held in trust, $otherCompany will pick it up and get you running again. Code held in escrow or something of that ilk. Except this protection clause cost more p.a. than the software did... and it was only for nutritional data in the kitchen.

Edited January 14, 2014 by sonofsanta

[pete]

Knee-jerk: So they have the capability to honour the existing contract (reliable web hosting), but they'll charge you £500 extra for the privilege?

 

Considered: If they're offering the use of a CDN to ensure availability then yeah, there's a cost involved. Whether £500 is fair depends on what you've got with them.

 

A better approach would be "Dear customer, would you like us to make your site more robust through the use of a CDN?"

[creese]

I had a bad attack when I was with 1&1, I am with Vidahost now and no problems. Plus I save a fortune, paying less for 3 years than I did in 9 months there.

[SchoolsBroadband]

DDoS protection and attacks against web servers are getting more and more complex and difficult to stop. It's not just about flooding the network with traffic but looking at specific application attacks etc.

 

Anti DDoS kit is very expensive (trust me we're looking at some more at the moment and it's well over £150k + support). I guess you get what you pay for with your web hosts........

[IrritableTech]

I usually agree with what Dave says - you get what you pay for. However I also think there are also exceptions to every rule.

 

I've been using vidahost for six months now for my own sites - excellent service generally. I've coupled this with cloudflare. I can't praise them enough for their DDoS protection and CDN. The problem with shared hosting is you may be protected - but what about everyone else on the same box?

Edited January 14, 2014 by IrritableTech