The Outage
At about 11:20 pm UTC April 11, the YWS server crashed. It was down until about 2:20 am UTC April 12, or for three hours.
What caused the outage was a massive botnet attack targeted at Wordpress blogs. You can read more about here:
http://blog.cloudflare.com/patching-the ... rdpress-br
Essentially, someone was attempting to hack a large number of Wordpress blogs using a brute-force attack. Writing Gooder, our group blog, is a Wordpress blog and was one of the many, many blogs targeted. Since WG is on the YWS server, the server crashed due to the brute-force attack.
To fix this issue, all traffic to WG is now routed through Cloudflare, which was not the case in the past. Cloudflare is a very powerful content delivery network through which all YWS traffic is routed, and it helps to stop malicious attacks before they occur.
Thus, everything should be good now.
Linode is Awesome
Plus, with the site down, I took the time to do a massive server upgrade, and I do mean massive. YWS is hosted by Linode, and Linode recently upgraded all their server plans pro gratis.
So instead of being hosted on a server with 4GB of RAM, YWS is now hosted on a server with 8GB of RAM at no extra cost per month. This is... incredible. It's like someone handing you a $1,000 per year for nothing. For the first time in a very long time, the server actually has RAM in excess of the site's needs.
I'm still a little bit in shock about it. On top of that, Linode is spending a lot of money on improving their network. I've had nightmare experiences with hosting companies in the past, but Linode is incredible.
To sum it all up...
Outage due to massive botnet attack
Server upgrade because YWS' hosting provider is great
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