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Young Writers Society


April 11, 2013 Outage and Why I Love Linode



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Fri Apr 12, 2013 2:54 am
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Nate says...



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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Fri Apr 12, 2013 3:20 am
StoneHeart says...



Well, I'm glad it's over.

I'm curious as to all that this new upgrade will do. . . .?

What would've happened if the botnet attack had broken into WordPress?
For I who am poor have only my dreams
I spread my dreams under your feet . . .

. . . tread softly for you tread on my dreams.


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Fri Apr 12, 2013 3:39 am
noninjaes says...



Is it just me, or has YWS's loading time been cut in half?
Noni Naps Through Nano
NaPoWriMo 2016
Stories Not Otherwise My Own

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Being awesome since Jan 2012.
  





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Fri Apr 12, 2013 4:51 am
Nate says...



BlackNether12 ->> The new upgrade doubles the amount of memory. When you double memory on your computer, you'll notice that applications load faster and that you can play better games. With a web server, it means that the sites hosted on it load much faster. That means faster load times.

If the botnet attack was successful, it probably would've injected a lot of malicious javascript into the posts; that is, it would've placed viruses on the blog.


Ninja ->> Not just you! Loading times should be much improved.
  








I didn't want to slow time, I just wanted to make a little rock.
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