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Everyone,
I want to clear up what is happening right now with the site and all of the downtime. It seems that we have been under a nightly DoS attack. We have not received any communications as to why, so it does not seem to be extortion.
If you do not know what a DoS is, it is when a hacker group decides to take a site down, they use thousands or even millions of bot machines (random PCs infected with a virus that lets the hacker issue it commands) to just access the site over and over to overwhelm its servers.
While we do have enough hardware resources to handle our regular day to day traffic, we don't have enough hardware to handle all of these simultaneous requests. We are investigating a possible platform change that will give us the flexibility to dynamically add more resources as they are needed.
This is something we have put off as the billing is tricky and we really don't know what the actual costs are going to look like.
We will keep everyone in the loop as decisions are made on how we will continue to deal with these attacks in the future.
In the meantime, keep an eye on both the twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/insanejournal)
Thank you all for your patience.
I want to clear up what is happening right now with the site and all of the downtime. It seems that we have been under a nightly DoS attack. We have not received any communications as to why, so it does not seem to be extortion.
If you do not know what a DoS is, it is when a hacker group decides to take a site down, they use thousands or even millions of bot machines (random PCs infected with a virus that lets the hacker issue it commands) to just access the site over and over to overwhelm its servers.
While we do have enough hardware resources to handle our regular day to day traffic, we don't have enough hardware to handle all of these simultaneous requests. We are investigating a possible platform change that will give us the flexibility to dynamically add more resources as they are needed.
This is something we have put off as the billing is tricky and we really don't know what the actual costs are going to look like.
We will keep everyone in the loop as decisions are made on how we will continue to deal with these attacks in the future.
In the meantime, keep an eye on both the twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/insanejournal)
Thank you all for your patience.