performance has dropped for posting or browsing the forum clicking anything sometimes it takes a while to load, searching takes a while, even posting something (and just a text reply) , takes a while to go through sometimes
Thanks. I am aware of the problem. It seems that someone is flooding the forum with a lot of traffic. Some sort of ddos attack. But not really sure what they are trying to achieve with this little website. The traffic comes from all sorts of hosts too. So far, other than the slow down, the server seems to be holding up. I am looking into what's the proper action would be. Meanwhile, please bear with us.
and also new acc signups https://www.reddit.com/r/badminton/comments/19ed5gs/badminton_central_still_exist/
nope, definitely not ok. I've just posted a new thread and it was a major pain in the bum to write and release it. I basically had to write it twice - not speaking of the super slow picture upload. Hope the issue will be resolved quickly.
this thread reminds me that nothing lasts forever. I wish to say thank you to kwun for starting badminton central
I didn't want to rush with any good news just to get disappointed again, but it indeed looks like the situation has been improved a lot over the past days. Browsing has been constantly smooth, also posting and picture upload seem to be stable again. So thumbs up and thanks a lot @kwun for solving the issue!
Maybe Everybody is targeted and it can be quite random. So then It'd be like asking why am I getting targetted by a Nigerian spammer. From his perspective it's just another email address. He probably doesn't know or care about what the website is. He sees an IP and that it runs a web server. Apparently there are loads of DDOS attacks and there are companies that offer DDOS mitigation services https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/ddos/ It might be that an attacker or attackers take an interest in particular IP ranges. And this server's IP happens to be in range. Or Maybe the service running this web server has only basic DDOS protection and DDOS attacks which keeps evolving https://www.meloncube.net/blog/evolution-of-ddos-attacks-gaming/ have gotten through. So then it wouldn't be that attacks have just started.
I honestly don't know why. But seems that many sites are getting targeted. while small sites don't have much to lose, no national secrets here, but unfortunately small sites also don't have much to offer in terms of paying for any service to mitigate the attack. I have put in something in the server to avoid losing BC for prolonged amount of time, basically, just have the server restart the web server every so often, so if it does hang, it will be restarted within some time frame. If it is not hang, there will be a 5 second gap where no one will notice..
Added some more measures to see if it helps. Seems ok for now, please do send feedback here if the site becomes bogged down again.
hopefully that works you might want to check out ovh if not, they get a bad rep for crap support, but if you know what you're doing on the server they're fine. been with them for many years and had no problems. they come with ddos protection and are relatively cheap. i have to say though even on my addresses which aren't known to the public like this site, I still get a lot of traffic from random places which I wouldn't classify as a DDOS. It might just be an increase in crawlers/scrapers, or even spam bots trying to create accounts? That wouldn't surprise me given the recent surge in bad bots and the site is so strongly SEO'ed with a lot of content when it comes to searches for badminton. If you can mitigate by restarting the web server it's not a particularly strong ddos.
Not really, there's nothing in it for the attacker to DDOS random IP addresses. Not unless kwun gets a blackmail request to stop. The only thing I can think of is that they're attacking the server host, if it is a DDOS. Either blackmail or to put them out of business. But really then the host would have notified, so it makes no sense to me.
clould flare Free tier has "Unmetered DDoS Protection" the Pro tier, US$20 per month, seems good too! https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/plans/ I just realise there is a wikipedia page on DDOS mitigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS_mitigation
