Hi all,

We’ve been experiencing serious problems with HostNine over the last few days due to outages with the Node8 California server.

Yesterday we saw the following in their forum:

node8 is currently being attacked we are working on this as fast as possible

Then an hour later:

It usually depends on the severity of the attack.

Anyways, it looks like we had to block the shared IP address on the server to stop the attack, anyone that does not have a dedicated IP address will be down for an undetermined amount of time.

Then six hours later (early morning)

 Hello everyone, the datacenter should be releasing the IP in about an hour. We apologize for any inconvenience however we had no control over this. And to be clear, this did not effect the servers uptime, just the access to it.

In case you are confused as to what exactly uptime is, please read this:
(Links to Wikipedia’s article on Uptime)

The finally one hour and 15 minutes later

The base IP has been unblocked and all sites are accessible again.

After some complaints regarding the outage, here are some of the H9 staff responses:

Things happens with servers that are uncontrollable. We do our best to keep our servers secure. We have custom kernels, we custom config our firewall, etc.

We have many security options in place. Sometimes things will happen. Sometimes a hard drive will fail. Sometimes our server will get attacked. We had to block our own IP’s so that the attacker could no longer get to the server. Otherwise, all your data could have been compromised.

We do apologize, but we had no control over it.

And

If we are unable to locate or block the attacker at first, we need to block the server IP’s so that the attacker can no longer access our server.

This is all of the information that was posted as of this blog posting.

From the sounds of it, someone’s site was being DDoS attacked which caused this site as well as countless others to be blocked. The only people that were not effected had dedicated IPs on the server. Everyone else, including us, saw a very long outage.

Here is a screenshot I took from this month’s ping report. See all of the outages we’ve experienced?

Our service has reported our site has been available to the internet 93.78% of this month. That means this site has been offline / unviewable for 6.22% of the time for the first week.

Not good. We think the offender site (that caused the DDoS attack) has been removed from the server. If that is the case, we should see improvement over the next weeks. If not, I will consider using HostNine’s migrate account wizard to move this site to another location such as Texas.

Anyway, what do you think? Please comment.