Sorry for the Downtime

[vangogh]

Hey All,

Sorry for all the downtime yesterday. My server was getting hit hard by an attack on one of my other sites. Nothing was comprised at all, but the attempts bog down the server until it can't handle the load and then I have fun getting to know all the support people at my hosting company, while we try to get everything back online.

Hopefully today will be a better day.

Steve

[KristineS]

Sorry yesterday was so annoying! Hopefully today is a better day.

[billbenson]

Ya, I did notice that.

[Freelancier]

Today appears to be annoying too.

[vangogh]

I don't think I was the only one hit by this. I read yesterday that Envato, which owns a few well known sites in design/development and related circles was also taken down, but what I assume was the attack. I'm trying to decide where to move the site. I have to balance what I can reasonably afford to spend with a hosting set up that can handle the spikes in load when something like this happens.

[Owen]

I don't think I was the only one hit by this. I read yesterday that Envato, which owns a few well known sites in design/development and related circles was also taken down, but what I assume was the attack. I'm trying to decide where to move the site. I have to balance what I can reasonably afford to spend with a hosting set up that can handle the spikes in load when something like this happens.

Yeah, they're the guys that owns ThemeForest and Codecanyon and a bunch of others.

This is weird, I just hope I'm not affected :(

[vangogh]

Oh don't worry, nothing happened here. It was all on my design site and nothing was compromised there either. I have plenty in place to protect the logins, though there's no such thing as 100% security.

The issue is that when they try brute force attacks they hit the server a lot and the server can't handle the load so everything goes down for a time. The server should be able to handle it given what I pay for it, but clearly it can't so I'm looking into other options. I think I know what I'm going to do, but I have a few questions for the hosting company and then I have to do some work moving the sites. I also have family coming into town so I may not get to it for another week or so.

If your worried, make sure you use a strong password here and use different passwords for different sites. If it's too much to manage different passwords you can buy something like 1Password (https://agilebits.com/onepassword). It's on every platform. You add all your passwords to the app and you use your one master password (hence the name 1Password) to unlock the app. The app then logs you into everything.

I hesitated buying it for a couple of years. I don't know what it costs on other platforms, but on the Mac and iOS side of things it was about $50 for the Mac, and maybe another $25 to get both he iPhone and iPad apps. I assume the prices are similar on the Windows/Android side. If you wait till Christmas they'll likely all be on sale. That's what I did. I think I got all three apps for the normal price of the Mac app.

It's become one of the apps I couldn't live without any more. I let the app generate very secure passwords that no one would remember, but the beauty is you no longer have to. The sync between computer, phone, and tablet is also great.