Sounds like an opportunity for the other managed Rails hosts.
Right, especially considering EngineYard and Blue Box are here at RailsConf
Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
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Re: Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just guessing, but maybe someone didn't like the content of a stored public "pastie"?
... and had too much time on their hands. Seriously, when something is offending me, I contact the author and webmaster first. Not take the whole cluster down.
Maybe they did to no effect, or maybe the content was of such nature that they didn't want to draw any extra attention to it. Pure speculation of course, but no matter the reason, they achieved the intended end result "efficiently".
Re: Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
#13This behavior of unplugging the destination of the DDoS is common with smaller hosts. They don't have the capital to spend on expensive mitigation devices. There are times when these attacks affect their entire network (bad design), so their quick and fast solution is to null route you at their cores.
Re: Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
#14I don't know about the scale of the DDoS attacks but have you tried cloudflare?
Re: Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just guessing, but maybe someone didn't like the content of a stored public "pastie"?
... and had too much time on their hands. Seriously, when something is offending me, I contact the author and webmaster first. Not take the whole cluster down.
It is actually cheaper to launch a DDoS attack then to talk to the webmaster, if you already control enough zombies and value your personal time highly enough.
The attack might have been launched for the fun of it, too. Why not, when you won't be affected personally?
Re: Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
#16Re: Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
#17Perhaps an opportunity for Cloudflare to offer support?
We would love to help, and have offered.
Re: Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
#18DDOS attacks are a fact of life, nice to know that Rails Machine will throw you under the bus when one happens. Doesn't seem to fit their homepage description: "You write Rails apps. We deploy, manage, support, monitor, and scale them. Done."
So if someone throws multiple tens of gigabits at your customer, and your upstream threatens to turn off your entire hosting company, you would respond "no way, we're going the extra mile for our customer"?
Rails Machine was, in all likelihood, compelled to act to either (a) preserve its relationship with is upstream or (b) preserve its relationship with its other paying customers that do not attract DoS attacks. Your idealism will fall down quickly when one annoying customer threatens service for every last one of your clients: it becomes a "do I continue to get paid or do I fight for this customer" equation.
Price out mitigation equipment and the multiple high-level engineers you will need to administer it before you respond telling me how wrong I am, by the way. The gear alone is an engineer's salary just to get started.
Edit: Fine, I dropped the Amazon example.
Re: Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
#19DDOS attacks are a fact of life, nice to know that Rails Machine will throw you under the bus when one happens. Doesn't seem to fit their homepage description: "You write Rails apps. We deploy, manage, support, monitor, and scale them. Done."
So if someone throws multiple tens of gigabits at your customer, and your upstream threatens to turn off your entire hosting company, you would respond "no way, we're going the extra mile for our customer"? Rails Machine was, in all likelihood, compelled to act to either (a) preserve its relationship with is upstream or (b) preserve its relationship with its other paying customers that do not attract DoS attacks. You…
Amazon did not drop Wikileaks fearing DDOS attacks. They dropped Wikileaks fearing Lieberman.
Re: Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
#20I can not understand these attacks. Why block a service that is free of charge, useful and did no harm? Unless of course this DDoS was not targeted, which makes even less sense to me. Also, why did Rails Machine throw out the site so quickly? If I choose to sponsor someone out of my free will, I'd do so without distinction from paying customers.
In such a case, those who launch the DDoS may have no legal/legitimate grounds to take some disfavored content down. (Perhaps it is embarassing to their prophet, government, guru, criminal enterprise, or movement.) They may have asked for material to be taken down, and the hoster said, "no, it's legal content" – at which point the DDoS is launched as both primary censorship (disabling access to the whole site) and censorship-by-blackmail ("take it down or your whole site stays down").
On the other hand, it's also possible that the originators of the DDoS are angry about something the hoster did take down. Perhaps they'd put up material against the rules, Pastie took it down, and in a tantrum after-the-fact, they decided to retaliate with a "well if you won't host our stuff we'll block eveyone". (This is a bit more like the Anonymous DDoS against payment services they didn't like.)
Without a statement from those involved, it can be hard to determine DDoSer motivations, but those are some common patterns.