10 Comments on “Access Weirdness”

1. Plus, you’ll be ready in case The Man decides to sniff your packets, and round up any dissident cat-baconers they find.

2. “… I couldn’t access my own Web site.”

   That’s happened to me too, now and then since 1996.

   It causes, in me, a Phil Dickian existential terror. It is as if a testicle or brain hemisphere has been suddenly removed, all the more frightening because one doesn’t remember having an accident or surgery, or even noticing the loss of function.

   How severe is this net-stroke? How much of me is gone?

   How long have I been dead?

3. John – I got a series of 404’s this morning between 10 and 11:30 am EST (I’m on Embarque). Seems to be fine now though.

4. John,

   my sites(s) are hosted on a leased server at 1and1 and I’m not aware of any glitches yesterday (one site has pretty high traffic volumes)

   One thing I wanted to mention – that I was unaware of until I ran into the issue – was their policy for dealing with DOS attacks:

   if the attack goes on long enough, 1and1 will take MY server offline for 24 hours as their final solution to the problem.

   My reaction to this is that they’re punishing the victims. As a result I’m searching for another hosting company. Yes, 1and1 is inexpensive and pretty reliable under normal circumstances, but I’m involved in a competitive situation with one of those sites: coincidentally, whenever we issue a DMCA (or quasi DMCA) to our ‘competititor’, they comply and then we get hit with a DOS attack within 24 hours. Under those circumstances, I need someone with a better solution than taking ME offline.

   Not your issue of course, but since we share hosts, I thought you might like to know about this ‘policy’.

5. Steve,

   That’s a fairly common policy at hosting companies, honestly. I’d be surprised to find any low-to-moderate cost hosting company that did it differently. The expensive ones might use the DDoS mitigation system (which are of mixed effectiveness, in my experience), but the basic response to DDoS is still basically containment.

   (and yes, that sucks.)

6. I’ve been using 1and1 for a few years, but I’m looking to find someone else. Their customer support is terrible… I’ve gotten the same canned non-answer for every question I’ve asked them–all of which have been about breakages caused by them.

   I know, you get what you pay for, but still…

7. JGS:

   Really? Generally speaking my experience with them has been positive, with the exception of them not telling me that Movable Type sites have a tendency to break when they get too large because they limit the time scripts can run. Other than that, however, no complaints.

8. Hello John Scalzi,

   This is a message from Lamont with Embarq Customer Support. I am glad to hear that you were able to re-access your webpage. Please let us know if you had any additional concern about your internet access. We strive for complete customer satisfaction and with your help we can improve our service. Thank you for using Embarq, your complete communications solution.

   Lamont L.
   Embarq Customer Support
   embarq_lamont@embarq.com
   For additional support please visit http://www.embarq.com/freetv or call 1-877-646-3282
   Voice | Data | Internet | Wireless | Entertainment

9. John:

   Yup. There hasn’t been anything catastrophic, more like a cumulative series of annoyances. The most recent was a problem with e-mail sent through their newsletter tool bouncing. I sent them a detailed note saying I had checked a, b, c & d, and they sent back a boilerplate response saying ‘there are many reasons why e-mail can bounce, please check a, b, c & d’…

   I don’t mind the occasional glitch–hell, I work in the tech industry, I know how it goes. But I do mind having my polite and detailed requests for help dismissed with a generic (and unhelpful) response.

   YMMV.

10. Irony alert: when I posted that last comment I got a whole page of php errors. Looks like the comment posted anyway…