Recent Site Slowness

I am aware.

We have been under a DDOS attack for about 3 days now. This is nothing malicious for you, just for me. They bombard the server with requests that end up pinning the CPU and slowing things down. One of the perks of being a popular site.

I have seen as many as 12,000 requests from the same IP over a 5-second period. I block an IP, and they just move to another.

This is what is should normally look like, 5 to 15% CPU usage...


When they attack, and the site is slow, the CPU is at 100%. The requests basically have to wait in line.

I'm working on a solution, which will likely be Cloudflare. I've been trying to keep up with the IPs myself and blocking them since that would just be another monthly fee, which will likely put us around $425 a month to keep the lights on.

I activated Cloudflare on this site about a month ago, and it broke some things, so I turned it off. So this will be some work to implement and will likely cause some bumps along the way. I will thank you now for your patience.

Thank you for the update Bobby and for all that you do.

I'm ready to just get a real job and shut down the sites. This is absurd, it shouldn't be this hard.

I don't know how anyone other than the people who designed Cloudflare ever gets it working. It's ridiculous.

As soon as you implement it, the site breaks, you fix the first issue just to reveal a new one, you fix the second issue just to reveal another new one, so on and so on and so on.

I'm about to throw in the towel, it shouldn't be this hard.

The only support I have is their forum, and I can't even start a topic because they want so much information that I don't have or know how to get. You have to be an expert already just to start a topic.

Ugh.

Hang in there Bobby; We all appreciate your efforts, even if most of us "forget" to mention it.

I would think that at some point the firewall AI will get smart enough to detect patterns of IP address allocation and be able to preemptively block these automatically. DDOS attacks stink.

Of course, the bad guy's AI will come up with faster ways to create a DDOS attack that the good guy's AI can't keep up with.



PS: I just had to borrow uboatnut's clever hacker image. Thanks for sharing it.

Thanks Bob, I have been on the site almost 2 weeks with no issue of it logging me out! Sorry for all the frustration!!!