My publisher’s website has crashed, apparently due to some kind of DOS attack beginning last night at around 5PM. I’m not privy to the tech details, but from a brief message last night, they were receiving 50k packet requests in 50 seconds.
Probably wouldn’t be too much for a major website, but this company doesn’t get that kind of traffic, and as far as I can tell, there were no major news stories or website links toward the company to generate such a traffic spike – like a slashdot effect.
Now I have no idea what the publisher’s webhost is doing to combat this; frankly I’m shocked that it’s lasted this long, but I don’t know how one fights this kind of attack. So that’s my question for you guys: How do hosts handle this kind of thing? How does one ever get back up and running?
(As a sidenote, I gotta say this is the worst possible time of year for this to happen – not that it’s ever a good time, but this company sells romance novels and Valentine’s Day is their biggest sales time of the year, not surprisingly. They’re on a shared server with only a few much smaller sites sharing their space; the evidence is that the attacks are aimed at the publisher. I can’t even imagine why … a competitor? A homophobe (they just released their first same sex novels)? Seems doubtful but who knows…)