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“We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

status.linode.com

11–20 of 151 posts

Re: “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

#11
It's not hard to compare this to brush fires. They happen periodically, and only the big trees tend to survive them. Linode is getting pretty unlucky here, but I would imagine that all the small time (and even the medium sized) hosting provides are going to succumb eventually. Is the end game just going to be Google vs. Amazon?

Re: “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

#12

I've done some googling before asking here: Can anybody explain why Linode is so often targeted like this? We moved Cronitor off Linode in spring 2015. During the christmas holiday when they suffered a 2 week DDOS I thought of the family time I'd be missing that year as we did a crash migration to AWS had we not migrated when we did. I have to imagine this has been horrible for their business. I would use Linode if I…

We stuck with Linode after that, but the important parts now failover to Vultr.

Re: “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

#13

It's not hard to compare this to brush fires. They happen periodically, and only the big trees tend to survive them. Linode is getting pretty unlucky here, but I would imagine that all the small time (and even the medium sized) hosting provides are going to succumb eventually. Is the end game just going to be Google vs. Amazon?

I'd love to see a network infrastructure and transport protocol that's more resistant to many (D)DoS attacks, because it seems like things will only worsen if it never becomes more difficult for people to attack others' servers online.

Re: “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

#15

Well, I had Linode shortlisted for an upcoming project. I hate to take them off the list because it is not their fault, but I don't want this kind of unreliability.

Atlanta is their smallest datacenter IIRC with their lowest bandwidth capacity.

I would still recommend them as we have had great luck with their Dallas DC. It seems to be the most resilient of them all in terms of random network outages and also DDOS attacks.

However the one in December did take them offline for a few hours but after which they apparently implemented more DDOS protection. Keep in mind this could happen to anyone (Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc) and mostly their mitigation techniques seem to be to kill your VM until the attack is over.

Re: “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

#16
post #12

I've done some googling before asking here: Can anybody explain why Linode is so often targeted like this? We moved Cronitor off Linode in spring 2015. During the christmas holiday when they suffered a 2 week DDOS I thought of the family time I'd be missing that year as we did a crash migration to AWS had we not migrated when we did. I have to imagine this has been horrible for their business. I would use Linode if I…

We stuck with Linode after that, but the important parts now failover to Vultr.

How did you set it up to failover? Our MySQL database is very large, and I'm not sure of the best way to ensure it is up to date on another host.

Re: “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

#18
post #7
post #5

OK, who hosts at Linode and is very popular/pisses people off? 4chan? 9gag? Reddit? Something Awful?

I think 9gag used to be on linode? I'm pretty sure none of the rest are though.

Yeah Reddit is on AWS[1] and 4chan appears to be self-hosted (or at least it was for most of its existence)[2]

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/8/26/reddit-lessons-lea... [2] https://www.4chan.org/news?all#106

Re: “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

#19

Well, I had Linode shortlisted for an upcoming project. I hate to take them off the list because it is not their fault, but I don't want this kind of unreliability.

> it is not their fault

I don't understand this line of reasoning. It's not like DDoS attacks are some kind of 0-day failure mode that nobody has seen before.

Would you also say "it is not their fault" if their uplink provider had a fiber cut and they didn't have redundant uplinks? I'm guessing not: it's well understood that has a service provider you need to plan for this kind of unavailability and pay more money for redundant links. So it seems really weird to have this double standard for a different kind of availability failure mode.

Just like network availability or datacenter power availability, you need to invest technical and financial resources into DDoS defenses if you want to be resilient to incidents. If you don't do that as a hosting provider, I definitely won't feel sad for you.

Re: “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

#20

I've done some googling before asking here: Can anybody explain why Linode is so often targeted like this? We moved Cronitor off Linode in spring 2015. During the christmas holiday when they suffered a 2 week DDOS I thought of the family time I'd be missing that year as we did a crash migration to AWS had we not migrated when we did. I have to imagine this has been horrible for their business. I would use Linode if I…

I am also surprised as this is not the first time I am reading about it on HN. Linode seems to be highly vulnerable to certain attacks as we could see in the past. I hope they will fix it and provide a permanent solution as I was hoping to use them as a part of my network, but I see more and more signals they can't handle serious traffic. Hopefully, they will redesign their infrastructure to handle it.

I am with all of you guys that are affected by this. I am looking forward to them to resolving this soon.

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