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You know you're doing something right when some people begin to hate you. Whether it be from taking over their traffic source, to dominating a niche they are in, to whatever... The more you do, the more people will not like it.
This last week someone really decided that they hate my dad. My dad is also an internet marketer full time. He however, is an advertiser, not a publisher / affiliate like I am. He's on the other side of the spectrum.
As my dad's sites continue to dominate the niches he is in, more people are getting frustrated and launching attacks at him.
Just last week a guy decided to use bots to download files off my dad's sites to the tune of 50 mbps steady downloads. We blocked him and thought that everything would be fine and dandy. I kept monitoring it in Web host manager (bad idea btw) and thought things were fine.
This was until yesterday when I received a bandwidth overage notice. I looked and realized the guy was at it again to the tune of almost 5000 gigs of bandwidth. It wasn't enough to bog the server, but enough to drain maximum bandwidth. That little overage right there is estimated at almost $2800 bucks. I'm working with Liquidweb on trying to see what they can do about reducing the bill since... the unmetered port is only $1100. I will be posting the outcome of that when I know for sure.
So there you have it... If you want to be successful, learn to get thick skin. While I was extremely upset at this at first I've come to peace about it. Sometimes, we just can't stress about issues we have no control over. All we can do is try as hard as possible and hope and pray for the best. 
PS > If you know this guy, tell him I need a favor when I find an address. 
Can i join that person while kicking the nuts?I’d love to.
Some niches are worse than others.
Sell baby wipes and everything is good in the hood. Either way, it says a lot for the dude’s business strategy if it comes down to this.
When you pray and hope for the best you always see justice done in the end
I hope you and your dad can remain focused and you’ll see that those haters start to dwindle down.
I’m just curious –
Are there any procedures (or plug-ins) or Something you can use to prevent this?
As someone who hopes to set up a website this makes me pretty nervous. I’d like to know if I have options for defending myself
This is true – I think that with better monitoring and setting some of your own bandwidth thresholds you should be able to be better prepared. Jonathan what are your plans for perventing future attacks like this ??
Bandwidth thresholds were there – the botnet attack adapted to it and would run right under the thresholds.
The tech I talked to said it’s one of the most advanced botnet’s he has seen.
I saw Facebook and Twitter outages late last week with foreign spammers running denial of service scripts.
Is there a technical name for this type of attack?
It’s known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. I’m surprised they were able to go 7TB (The 5TB overage plus the 2TB the server likely comes with) without LW noticing and shutting it down.
Unfortunately you’ll never get a real IP for the guy.
Oh, and while I do really think LW is a great company, if you notice this again check out the DDoS protection from gigenet.com. It’s what they specialize in and they do it extremely well.
It’s good LW worked with you so diligently. They could have turned their back and said it’s your dedicated server, sorry.
Hate to say it, but it’s time for some real hosting man. If LW didn’t shut you down after xxxxx amount of BW being used, and couldn’t protect from the DDoS attack, that’s pretty lame.
Read: http://www.gigenet.com/ddos-protection.html
It was not a DDos actually.
It was a botnet and they have protection against it but it’s one of the more sophisticated attacks.
Botnets are used for DDoS attacks, it’s about the only way to execute one. Like I said, LW is good, but if it happens again I can almost guarantee that Gigenet will protect against it better, sophisticated or not.
And I’ve had over 20 servers with LW.
I wouldn’t take this too lightly, in my mind, at least 3 crimes were committed; 1) Unauthorized access of a computer, 2) Interfering with interstate commerce and 3) Wire fraud. This is the type of thing the FBI handles. Calling your local office and at least getting a report made about the incident, with as much information as you have, would help a great deal if this needs to go to court later. Best of luck.
This is a horrible thing to happen. I wonder did he do this again?
[...] #9 jonathanvolk.com: People Will Hate You… [...]