The hosting company is dealing with an internet attack

tom

Well-known member
Administrator
The member's website hosting company is dealing with an internet attack. Hopefully the site will be back online soon.
 
The server came back online around 3:30am Mountain and was up for several hours. It seems it is down again. I just called Hostek and they are having their admins look into it.

I'm considering moving the member site to another platform if they can't resolve this.

I'll keep you updated.
 
system is down again. I just left a voice mail and support chat.

no resolution yet.

I may be forced to find an alternative for the member's web site. :(
 
The site has been back up for a few hours and seems stable for now. Hopefully that's the end of this outage.
 
Upon further digging, it appears the server is slowly using all of the available RAM and becoming unresponsive. The tech added a resource monitor to see what's going on and what is using the RAM up. We'll address that once we know what the problem is. I am also going to increase the RAM in the server to attack it from two directions.

They are rebooting the server now and hopefully I'll have more information shortly.
 
Final update

I added 2 GB of RAM to the server and am shrinking the database files. This should make the server quite stable again.
 
Hosting update.

Apparently, my.aeromir.com has been the victim of a Denial of Service attack. The hosting company had this to say:
from 5/23 3:00 pm to 5/24 12:28 am

my.aeromir.com / 3408 requests
blocked 172.68.34.227

the other IP addresses shown did not have any reports in abuseIPDB.

This did not look like an attack but it was using resources.

3408 requests in 9-1/2 hours seems like an attack to me.

I turned on the CloudFlare DoS protection and Bot Fight Mode:

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Hopefully this addresses the server instability problems.

I still want to move the member's site though to a more off the shelf solution for long term ease of maintenance.

Let's see if this fixes the problems we've seen in the last few days.
 
Hi @tom, I did notice the slower entry to the site and the Cloudflare challenge to the browser. I'm wondering about the traffic: that works out to 6 requests per minute during that time frame. Does that qualify as an attack or could that be some polling or keep-alive program pinging the site for new posts? On a bright note, your site and forums are gaining popularity and might have been picked up on a crawler list or three. I'm speculating here. I've managed sites and servers, and I know that this is no fun. I feel your pain, and that 1:01am timestamp on your post.... Ugh. I hope you are napping right now. :)
 
I suspect the traffic wasn't steady but in bursts. I'll keep the cloudflare protection on for a bit longer. So far so good
 
Another update.

The server was unavailable again tonight. I dug deeper into the logs and saw that the virtual memory was being exhausted. The C: drive has around 5.8GB of free space but the D: drive has about 100GB. I added the D: drive to the virtual memory so now the server has 20 times the available virtual memory available.

I also reduced the size of the Java Heap (ColdFusion runs java under the hood).

I have reboots scheduled every 20 minutes starting at 12:20:16 am so you'll see reboots at 00:16, 20:16 and 40:16 each hour until I can verify that the system isn't running out of virtual memory.

I also created a windows task to restart the server if the virtual memory reaches "critical"

Between all of these changes, I hope the server will be more stable.

On another note, I created the sub-domain members.aeromir.com which is a new wordpress site that I'll build out for the members. First priority is to gets the current setup stable.
 
OK.. so the stuff I did still doesn't seem to be having a postive outcome. Here's my latest news:

- I signed up for a shared hosting account to move my.aeromir.com to. This should happen tomorrow morning. This is the short term solution.
- I created members.aeromir.com, which is just a copy of the public site at the moment. I'm connecting it to Infusionsoft (my CRM) so I can use the tags for each record to show the correct content. This is a bit longer term with the goal of replacing the coldfusion member's site.
- The other sites on the server will have their own shared hosting accounts to separate them. This will reduce my monthly expenses by quite a bit. I'll miss my VPS but I'd rather have sites without all of this drama.
- I'll try to have the trade alerts (experts and subscribers) moved to the new members.aeromir.com eventually but shorter term will probably still be at my.aeromir.com on the new shared hosting environment until I can code all of the changes.

The information pages for the classes and trade alerts are currently on the VPS but I'm slowly moving them to the wordpress public site. The A14 is already moved ( https://aeromir.com/a14 ) That page is loading quite quickly which I like quite a bit.

That's it for this update. I'll have more in the morning tomorrow.
 
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