The Batavian went off line for a time this morning

Posted by Howard Owens on October 27, 2009 - 8:23am
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The Batavian was essentially off line from about 8:30  to 9:15 a.m.

Our hosting provider was the target of a "denial of service" attack. A DOS is the result of some malevolent person(s) sending a large amount of random data to a server, preventing legitimate traffic from accessing that server. 

The Batavian is part of a shared hosting environment, so any site in that environment could have been the target of that attack.

Our provider worked quickly to block the attack and return service back to normal. We haven't received official confirmation from the provider that everything is OK, but the site seems to be operating fine at the moment. Hopefully, this attack will cause no further problems.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Posted by Tom Gilliatt on October 27, 2009 - 9:58am
Should just run your own server like I do.
Posted by Howard Owens on October 27, 2009 - 10:17am
That would be too unreliable for a service such as this, and to be able to handle the scale of what we need, expensive.
Posted by Chris Olin on October 27, 2009 - 11:32am
I should point out that running a home server is far less equipped to handle a DoS attack, not even considering the possibility of a DDoS attack.

For commercial hosting, 45 minutes of downtime from a DoS attack is within acceptable limits.
Posted by Howard Owens on October 27, 2009 - 11:47am
No matter the hosting environment, servers, configuration, quality of the routers and equipment, etc. -- there will be down time. It's just the nature of the beast. This is the most serious outage we've had. We've had a handful of five minutes or less -- usually, the server just needs a reboot.
Posted by Irene Will on October 27, 2009 - 12:40pm
Well, I MISSED you while I couldn't get on !!!! The Batavian is one of the first sites I CHECK in the morning - it's my virtual cup of coffee !!!!