Brad Feld

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The Heroes At ViaWest and StillSecure

Dec 10, 2008
Category Writing

As you probably noticed, for the past three weeks my blog has been up and down.  The week of November 20th, Feld Thoughts came under a large distributed denial of service attack.  While we’re not sure who began this attack (or why) we have finally been able to mitigate it enough to get the site back online thanks to ViaWest. Now for a little history as to what happened and how we combated it.

When we first started noticing problems with the blog, Ross did all the normal stuff and didn’t really notice anything. The server was online, CPU usage was nominal as was memory usage.  It was available, it simply wouldn’t serve pages. Netstat eventually revealed the problem was a big DDoS attack.

For the first week, our friends at StillSecure jumped in and helped us tune our existing server to try to get us back up and stable.  Each time we would get ahead of the attacker he/they would step the attack up to another level taking us back down.  We’d been talking about moving from our small hosting provider to a Tier 1 provider given the existing traffic levels before the attack – we finally decided to bite the bullet and move everything to a new server at ViaWest (where many of our portfolio companies host.)

I’m happy to report that we have moved the site over to the new server with ViaWest and we’ve been able to put a real firewall in front of the server.  This firewall, coupled with a much more powerful server and ViaWest’s substantial infrastructure, has gotten us back online and running great.  While the attack continues we have so far been able to handle it.

So a big thanks goes to ViaWest and their team for the assistance they’ve given us getting our new server up and running.  Also, big hugs to my friends at StillSecure for jumping in on a moments notice help us get to a place where at least we we able to weather the attack. 

Thanks guys, you’re the best!