We don’t know why my wife’s website was DDOS attacked. The site is an Artist’s website which appeals to a select group of viewers. Until a few weeks ago this site was attracting about 50 visitors per day. Then we got a

503 Service Unavailable

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server.

I figured that there was something wrong at our hosting provider. But no that was not the issue. I tried logging into the site using ssh. First I couldn’t ssh into my account. I got “could not fork processes” serveral times before I could login. Then when I tried to do a ps I got “no more processes”. Again I had to repeat this several times before I got a ps output. I immediately noticed that I had a ton of httpd daemon processes. Also I had a ton of email processes. Hoping to reduce the number of processes I had my hosting provider turn off email for this account but that did no good. Eventually my hosting provider turned off the website since my wife’s website was affecting the other servers. That’s when I realized that my hosting provider was not part of the solution, they were part of the problem.

‘There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.’ – Eldridge Cleaver

My hosting provider for this site was Verio and we used to be very happy with them. Many years ago we had hosting with a company called li.net. Then Verio bought them but things went well for a long time after that. We were always able to contact their systems Admins directly so if there was a problem we could solve it quickly with just a bit of dialogue.

Until recently.. It started when we had to register a new shared hosting site with them. A procedure that should have taken minutes took a couple of days. Hmmmm.