Over the last three or four days, Hosting Matters (the company I use and that hosts this site) has been knocked out by a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The attack was, according to what HM has posted, originally targeted at a pro-Israel/anti-terror site that is hosted on HM. The site was moved and the IP address being DoSed was blocked.
Unfortunately, the attack has continued, and because of how Qwest and AT&T handle routing and logging and flapping and the like, it’s continued to knock out HM. This impacts me and any number of other sites (Doyce and Instapundit, as two of many examples).
As I read the HM forums (as a sign of HM’s responsiveness to dealing with these problems, they quickly set up special support/discussion forums off of their main network), I see various folks who have business sites resold through HM talking about moving to a different host. Without any indication HM is mishandling things, moving to another host seems an exercise in futility; DoS attacks are ubiquitous, and major companies (Amazon, Microsoft) have been knocked off the air by them. Heck, my own employer has, too.
There’s another principle here, though, too. This is — well, I hesitate to call this a terrorist action, since it doesn’t seem to be designed to coerce through terror (though the target site itself specialized in identifying terror sites on the Net). Regardless it’s a politically motivated assault on free speech, and on a business, and as a matter of principle, I don’t want to see that assault succeed, either in knocking out the site they want, or in hurting the company that hosts that site. Let the bullies and vandals and brownshirts win, and the next time the target may be me. Or you. For that reason, as much as any other, I’m sticking with Hosting Matters.
It’s easy for me to say that, sure, since my site is personal; I don’t have a business losing money because our web site is down, or because the folks to whom I’ve resold hosting services are down. By all the same, the futility of trying to run away, the message that sends, and the fact that HM’s service has been not only very reliable, but their personal service extraordinarily good, leads me to say I’m staying here.
Whether you can read me or not.
P.S. In today’s technical arena, there’s a tendency to treat business as a commodity. Compete on price (or create a monopoly), and screw the customer when it comes to service. What I’m seeing on the HM boards belies that philosophy. Person after person is making it clear that the reason they are sticking is because of HM’s quality of personal service, going the extra yard, even in the face of technical problems and catcalls. If they treated their hosting as merely a commodity — “Well, if five people go out the door, five more will come in shortly anyway” — an attack like this would be devastating, because even if there’s no great reason to think that elsewhere is better, there’s no great reason to say, either. HM’s customer service clearly earns them customer loyalty.
A lesson a lot of businesses could learn.
HM rocks.
And what’s particularly appalling is when items like this need to be posted on their support boards:
We, above all, are well aware of the stress this sort of thing places on people. Please do not let your emotions run away with you when communicating with us. Threats of violence against our employees will absolutely not be tolerated and are a sure-fire way to find your account terminated.
Get a grip people.
I’m beginning to think that Anger Management should be a new subject area added to school curricula.
Actually (if I can play curmudgeon a moment), the schools and culture are teaching anything but. A sense of entitlement, praise for acting out and being honest with one’s feelings (regardless of the setting or situation), and a lack of discipline, are all hallmarks of too much of what our kids learn.
While I’m here, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not much to get pissed off about, but I wouldn’t be so peeved about the DOS attacks if it weren’t for the fact that I have all of my email addresses dumping into accounts on HM’s servers.
The weird thing, which I discovered late last night, is that Microsoft Entourage *won’t* download mail under these conditions, while Eudora and Mac OS X Mail seem to have no problem at all.
Farkin’ Microsoft…
Now I’m going to have to move all my mailboxes and reconfigure my contacts list all over again.
I don’t have any good answers for this–and in part it’s because I’ve had the luxury of not having to think about it since I don’t have kids–but it just seems that kids have been taught to spew whatever they want with no alternatives to handle the unbridled emotion they’ve been encouraged to express.
It’s like giving them a firehose and turning on the water.
Getting back to your post topic, though… yeah, these people really need to get a grip.
Side thought: Could this be a symptom of addiction? Not a physical/chemical addiction, but a psychological one. I mean, do these people get quite so up in arms when their phone service gets cut? It’s almost like they’re lashing out because they’re twitching violently for their Internet fix.
As for businesses, I suppose they have some right to being concerned, but welcome to the Internet. Where’s your backup plan?
Still, it doesn’t excuse people from not being courteous and certainly holds no sympathy for anyone that chooses to be abusive. (Are threats of violence considered criminal in the eys of the law?)
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Most of the venters (not counting the threats of physical violence, which I never saw) were resellers of web sites (whose customers were hammering them) or people who made money off their web site. And, yeah, the best thing there is to not have all your eggs in one basket.
I do maintain my Earthlink mail account (the freebie from my ISP), for just this reason. Oh, and for spam.
And on top of this, I’ll note, HM is crediting back to its customers treble the money the downtime actually represented. Jeez.
And as a note on top of that, so many people have turned down the credit, HM is going to offer it on a voluntary basis (i.e., if you want it, let us know).
Wow. Customer service -> customer loyalty. What will they think of next?