Why Website Crashes are Unavoidable

This article is on CNN right now, in a section called What Matters:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/11/wordpress.outage/index.html

It’s a timely article for us; if you’re hosted with us, you’re probably aware that there’s been a few instances of outages in the last month.  They’ve been for very short periods of time, but it’s frustrating and stressful just the same.  Our overall up-time is still well over 99.99%.  But in this 24X7 world, users and our clients are more aware of outages than they would have been a few years ago.  It’s always an immediate emergency even on a weekend or at midnight.

Several years ago, we moved our clients to servers at Rackspace, an extraordinarily reliable datacenter with truly fanatical support.  We put our clients on servers with each other, so they can have reliable hosting, while we have responsive support from the datacenter that answers the phone whenever we call them, without our clients having to bear the hosting and administrative expense of their own server.

One downside of being on a shared server, however, is that when someone on that server is attacked, it can impact the other sites on the server.  This is what happened in the slowdown over Memorial Day weekend.  The attack was a denial of service domain name URL attack.  A denial of service attack is when someone makes repeated rapid-fire automated requests to a server, literally causing it to be unable to service anyone else.  And the attack was additionally directed at a domain name, rather than at an IP address or a server.  That left the datacenter unable to give them a new IP address, and left the client unable to move to a new server. It was their domain name being attacked, so it would have continued regardless of what server they were on or what IP address they were using.  The solution was to shut that domain name off, wait for the attackers to get bored and move on, and then turn it back on and watch to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Even after the attack is over, and the server is back to normal, we always spend time, and so does Rackspace, trying to figure out how to protect our clients and the servers against any other attack or similar situation, too.

It’s a constant effort keeping in front of viruses, bots, denial of service attacks, and attempts to set up phishing sites on servers. As fast as technology finds a way to close up vulnerabilities, attackers find a new way in.  We can wish attackers found a better use for their time and obvious talents all day long, but as fast as the good guys close up vulnerabilities, the bad guys figure out a new way in.

And this is before even considering potential mechanical and electrical crashes, as mentioned in the CNN article.

When you’re looking for a development team, or a hosting solution…when you’re wondering why a server went down or hosting costs what it does, whether you’re a client of Wildwood or someone else, it’s important to remember that there’s a cost of ownership for a site.  It doesn’t end just because the site is live for the site owner, because it doesn’t end for the people supporting the site.

Servers have to be maintained, attacks have to be defended against, vulnerabilities need to be addressed. Operating systems have to be updated, hardware needs to be replaced and upgraded to allow for defense and expansion.

The software that runs your specific site, whether it’s third party or custom created, needs to be updated to the latest releases, too.  It’s part of being a good neighbor when you’re in a server community, and in the long run it saves you money and time.  It allows you to stay on a community server, which is less expensive, and it saves you recovery time if you’re the victim of an attack.

Reminds me of something Jean Carpenter Backus, the Naked Accountant put on Facebook back in May “Saving Tip $$ Best way to save money is to take care of what you have (example: car)…”

or my example: Server.

Cuz a ‘bit’ of prevention is worth a terabyte of cure. :)  (In my previous life I was queen #nerdpickuplines…remind me, if you’re interested, to share my six-page list of them sometime.  It’s almost as much fun as a weekend of phishing by the River Denial.)