All of a sudden this site went offline even though other sites on the same VPS operating through different I. P. Addresses were in operation.
I shot off a mail to ServerMania to ask what was going on.
“Hello,
Your machine has been the target of a DDoS attack, we have null routed the target IP 23.236…….. for 4 hours. We will continue to monitor this situation and remove the nullroute when the attack subsides.
If you wish to obtain DDOS protection on our network please review our DDoS protection plans: http://www.servermania.com/ddos-protection.htm
If you require assistance as to which plan to purchase please reply to this ticket and our sales team can assist you.”
Now, I am totally perplexed as to why anybody would target my poor little site which gets hardly any traffic in a day.
I suspect the hackers/ bot herders are running DDOS attacks against random I. P. addresses. I saw this also in the case of my 128MB Ramnode VPS which is used purely for storage purposes.
Interestingly, there are two significant differences between how RamNode and ServerMania handles the situation.
RamNode sent an email to inform about the “null routing”. ServerMania did not until I asked them. Also, RamNode does the “null routing” for only 5-10 minutes while ServerMania does it for 4 hours.
All in all, it is a big nuisance for everyone concerned.
But I don’t think ServerMania, RamNode or the other web hosts are complaining because this given them a chance to sell more “DDOS protection” services.
Who knows, maybe there is an unholy alliance between the hackers/ bot herders and the webhosts (?)