7 replies to this topic

[josh1r]

Hi all. I haven't posted in here ages but have an urgent question. Can anyone recommend a webhost (preferably an inexpensive one) that offers DDoS protection? My current does not offer it and my site recently got hit (and is still getting hit) by an attack. My host was able to fix it for a while, but the attackers adjusted and we had to take my site completely down.

I've searched online and every place I've found is at least $500/month... I don't mind doing that for 1 month to see if they can fix the problem, then switch back to a cheaper host and hope that the attackers have moved on.

But if anyone knows of another more permanent and/or less expensive option that would be great.

Worse case I'll move my store to a new domain name and hope the attackers don't look for it (I have no idea why I'm being attacked and hope that it's random and not personal). Of course I'll lose all my rankings, links, etc... and 301s will do no good as the attack would just follow the 301. But this is a topic for another discussion if/when it comes to this. In the meantime, any thoughts on DDoS protection would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[Jill]

We were hit here a few weeks ago too and my host didn't seem to know how to handle it at first. But if they look in your log files, they should be able to ban the user agents (if it's a similar attack as the one hitting us).

I don't know that any host can protect you from the very start, it's knowing what to do when it happens that's the important thing. Any host should know this, but unfortunately, it seems they don't.

[josh1r]

We were hit here a few weeks ago too and my host didn't seem to know how to handle it at first. But if they look in your log files, they should be able to ban the user agents (if it's a similar attack as the one hitting us).

I don't know that any host can protect you from the very start, it's knowing what to do when it happens that's the important thing. Any host should know this, but unfortunately, it seems they don't.

Thanks for the info!

[josh1r]

Well, my host was able to get the site back up this morning, but then the attackers adjusted and took me down again. Looks like I'm going to have to pay some $$$ to a professional DDoS mitigation company. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Separately, if (hopefully when) I'm up and running at full speed again, are there any suggestions as to what I should do as far as SEO? Or just hope that Google keeps crawling my site and doesn't 'mind' the downtime too much and kill my rankings?

Thanks again!

[Mooro]

HTTP 503 - the server is temporarily unavailable

What about Amazon AWS? Surely something that scalable and redundant has some kind of DDOS protection built in?

[josh1r]

HTTP 503 - the server is temporarily unavailable

What about Amazon AWS? Surely something that scalable and redundant has some kind of DDOS protection built in?

I'll look into Amazon, thanks.

Yeah, the site went up and down a few more times. Right now we have a workaround as you can see (at the handmade jewelry link below). I have a static version of my home page at the root, and then everything else goes to the dynamic pages. Looks like the bots are just hitting the root page and the static page is holding up since it doesn't call the database. We'll see how long this works for.

Any major SEO issues with having the static page at index.html and a similar dynamic page at index.php? If it's just a matter of google only showing one or the other that's fine, just don't want any duplication penalties...

[Jill]

Sounds like you're doing what I had to do as well.

Don't worry about search engines. They'll get everything squared away when you're back in business.

just don't want any duplication penalties...

No worries as there is no such thing.

[josh1r]

Great, thanks again!