Shooting SHED under attack

[ovenpaa]

Annoyingly the server the Shooting SHED is hosted on is under attack which means no Journal, no SHED shop and worst of all no emails right now so we are effectively dead in the water. This has been going on for about 20 hours now and I have no real idea when it will end. We could move the site to a different server however it means we are out for 48 hours whilst the DNS is updated.

Arghh......

So if you need to get hold of one of us I suggest a PM or call.

[M99]

Do you have a full copy of the site? - just upload it to somewhere else (A directory on another site will do) then run a simple URL redirect from your shed CP - should not then be effected by the attack.

(always handy to have a mirror!)

Mike

[rox]

We could move the site to a different server however it means we are out for 48 hours whilst the DNS is updated.

I'd suggest reducing your DNS TTL - it's huge (12 hours)! I keep mine at around 30 mins (long enough for most visitors' sessions), and reduce to 2 mins if I'm making changes or encountering problems that may require a switch, then you can move/redirect the site almost instantly. If you don't have control of this then move the DNS somewhere that gives you control - it's about the most critical part of your e-commerce infrastructure. It definitely needs to be somewhere different from your web hosting company. I keep email separate from web hosting separate from DNS separate from downloads, with some of these servers able to act as backups for the others. If you do keep a site mirror on standby as a backup, take care that the wrong version doesn't get flagged by search engines as duplicate content (use Google webmaster tools, for example).

Good luck riding this one out, and if it happens again I'd think about moving the site to a different hosting operation. I can't recall a DDOS that affected my commercial sites in the last 12 years, and I think the choice of hosting company has a lot to do with that.

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