What a strange topic for my second post!
There is a good reason for it, though. Recently my site, hosted by http://bluehost.com, started getting all silly and just generally giving “this page can’t be displayed” errors about every time I tried to load a page. Usually I could refresh my browser to get the page to load.
In a chat session with a Blue Host rep, I learned that the machine my shared hosting account is hosted on was experiencing a DDoS attack. In short, this is a denial of service attack whereby upset or malicious individuals pelt a machine with so much information, such as log in requests or just about anything as far as I know, and generally cause the server to be overloaded. They explained that this is not an attack on my site personally, but on the machine that my files are stored on.
So the way I see it, someone else who has a shared hosting account with Blue Host stored on the same machine that holds my own site must have ticked somebody off who has the know-how to do this sort of activity. That ticked off (or rather disgustingly bored) entity must be punishing them by launching a DDoS attack on their website’s IP. The problem is, with shared hosting accounts, we all use the same IP address (at least in the case of Blue host).
That said, Blue Host has three different shared hosting plans. I currently use the middle option, which does not include a dedicated IP. The next plan up does, and places your site’s files on a machine with 80 percent fewer other accounts than the plan I use. But, it is 240 dollars a year (according to my reading). They mentioned that I could get a dedicated IP for about 40 dollars a year on top of the cost of my existing plan (which turns out cheaper than the higher plan). They added that the dedicated IP should be a sure way to prevent such attacks from affecting my site again. Unless of course I got attacked directly.
So this is what I did. I’m now 40 dollars poorer, and the DDoS attacks have stopped causing me problems, just like that! How much do you wanna bet the attacks actually stopped right after I spent my money? My luck runs like that. But, ah well, can’t have everything.
I hope you have an enjoyable stay here
Cheers:
Aaron T. Spears (valiant)