[Solved] Tommy Often Down

[maicol07]

Hi, why Tommy is often offline?
Thanks

Edited July 6, 2017 by maicol07

[wolstech]

It's not Tommy specifically. We're being hit by DDoS attacks, which knock all of our servers including the forums offline. You can see the big red bands here, notice Johnny and our website go down too, and the nameservers struggle under the load: http://heliohost.grd.net.pl/monitor/

 

Unfortunately, for a small company like us, there's very little that can really be done to mitigate such an attack other than intentionally taking the target offline (which has limited effectiveness anyway since they can just change the IP they're targeting). As a result, we usually opt to just wait them out. As for the cause of the attacks, we don't have any concrete reasons, however past experience suggests a link between us banning phishing accounts, and us getting attacked shortly afterwards as retaliation for removing their phishing.

 

There's also brief 30s lags where things load really slowly on Tommy. These are caused by Apache restarting and usually correct themselves within a minute once the restart completes. Apache restarts a lot more often on Tommy than on Johnny (or Ricky when he was up) since Tommy restarts it every time a domain is added or modified, as opposed to whenever load is low enough (this is basically a trade off, we think it's nice offering a server where domains work instantly, but sites lag during the restarts. The alternative is what Johnny does...fewer restarts, but domains can take 24 hours to start working).

Edited July 6, 2017 by wolstech
Also Apache Restarts

[maicol07]

Ah... ok thanks. I hope that the attacks will stop... now Tommy is up!