Servers Upgraded and Back Online (Again!)

Although our attacker was not successful in actually bringing down our servers or causing an interruption of service, he did succeed in scaring off our host who shut down our VPS without warning and didn’t respond to my emails/phone calls for about 36 hours. Our host had advertised protection against that type of thing, but they neglected to mention that it’s much more cost-effective for them to just terminate a client’s contract in the event of a sustained attack. Fun times!

The crazy thing is that our attacker isn’t even particularly sophisticated:  the attacks have been small and have always originated from a single IP. We’re dealing with a script kiddie who googled the term “DDoS”, and it’s baffling to me how even the most highly recommended VPS hosts aren’t equipped to deal with that sort of thing. Therefore, we’re done with Virtual Private Servers and graduating to a true Dedicated Server with a host who specializes in DDoS protection. Triple the cost, but well worth the increased reliability and peace of mind moving forward.

Anyway, I apologize for the downtime. If I had understood the flawed nature of all VPS hosts then I would have just switched over to a dedicated server a couple weeks ago during the first round of attacks. This is just one of those growing pain things that I’m thankful happened now rather than down the road when we’ve got a ton of servers to worry about. I’m sure that this won’t be our last encounter with these sorts of attacks, but we’re much better equipped to handle them now.

I really appreciate everyone in the community being so understanding and supportive in regards to this situation. Any amount of downtime for an online game like this is really frustrating, and I’m very thankful to have a community of players who dealt with it so well.

Algol:  byond://72.20.57.158:50444

Zenithia: byond://72.20.57.158:51616


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4 responses to “Servers Upgraded and Back Online (Again!)”

  1. TalZahn Avatar

    Haha, Silk’s valentine’s day present to us was the gift of a dedicated server! ;D

    I missed NEStalgia more than I realized I would these past three days. Hooray for having it back!

  2. neb Avatar
    neb

    I wonder if the DDoSer is the guy you recently banned for getting extra gear from a glitch. I dont understand why anyone would want to do this unless they had some kind of grudge.

    Thanks Ninja O and Lumino for your awesome donations, I’m sure they are helping pay for the upgraded VPN hosts so we can play!

    1. Silk Avatar

      Nah, I don’t think so. It could be anyone from a disgruntled former player to some random BYOND troll, but without solid proof there is really no use speculating. It would be nice to find out who the attacker is and prosecute him, but the reality is that these types of attacks are becoming the norm (and VPS hosts need to catch up with the times).

      Nowadays an indie game dev apparently needs to pay extra for DDoS protection for their servers just as a small business pays for a security system for their office. It’s not fair that it has to be that way, but it’s just the cost of doing business.

  3. hanta Avatar
    hanta

    Good luck affording the upkeep 🙂
    I can’t really spare anything, but if I could, than I would. I’m on the edge of my seat in anticipation for NEStalgia’s next steps! Once the flash player and content expansion come out, I can just tell this game will experience a huge boom, of course I think everyone is expecting that at this point. Best of wishes, Silk Games team!

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