Chewing Pencils

This came from my web host to explain the down time from the last week:

Hello,

I would like to start with an extreme apology for the extended downtime. I will recap starting at the beginning of our situation as well as each step and issue that came up and how it was worked on.

In early September we were notified that the company who owned the Network  Operations Center was being purchased. We were informed that the NOC would stay opened until a migration date of late October where all of the servers would be moved to the main Andover NOC of the new company

There were many test runs over the past few weeks with some success and some issues that our new NOC provider assured us could and would be resolved. Friday was the final stages of the move it was to start at 11:00pm and be completed by 8:00am Saturday morning. During the move of the data process the NOC experienced a DDOS attack which caused the Data Center to cut service to all sites until the attack stopped. A DDOS attack is a malicious attack on a network with floods of information and data to the servers to bring a NOC down and stop service. This from what we understand it was the largest attack this NOC had ever seen. It was determined that a device(Tipping Point) from the original NOC was needed to stop any further DDOS attacks A private plane was booked and the device was flown in and installed late Sunday night.

At that point the servers were online and performing well (although under strain due to a weekend of email backlog). This has been a long weekend and we apologize for being unable to communicate to you during the migration of our servers.  We have been on conference calls for over 30 hours this weekend with NOC staff as well as a Tipping Point Engineer on site and the NOC as well.

Currently 80% of the servers are online and processing email and serving web pages as expected. We are now able to effectively communicate to each and every one of our customers and apologize for this extended period of downtime caused by several issues documented above. We expect the rest to be online shortly.

We are currently replying to each and every one of you who emailed us or submitted a helpdesk ticket as quickly as possible. We ask for your patience as we organize from this weekend and reply back to.

To calm fears please know that no data has been lost during this migration and any email which was sent on the weekend will be retrieved and stored correctly like it normally would.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us but we are currently expected a 3-6 hour turnaround due to a backlog of helpdesk requests.

We thank you for your patience during all of this.