Neatorama Server Issues
Late last night (two nights ago for our readers in the East Coast), our data center and hosting service SoftLayer was hit with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack. The attack was aimed at their DNS service, which caused many websites hosted at the company - including neatorama.com - to fail to resolve.
For those who don't know, DNS servers (or name servers) translate domain name (like neatorama.com) into IP address of the website's server. Without it, your browser wouldn't "know" where to contact the website's server.
The DDoS attack caused browser errors for some, but not all of you who try to visit the blog. I had trouble visiting the blog all night yesterday from home (with Comcast cable Internet) and all day today at work (with AT&T DSL). Anyways, the issue was finally resolved late today afternoon.
Softlayer is one of the largest data centers in the world (with over 21,000 servers). It's DNS servers use anycasting, so I couldn't begin to imagine what kind of DDos would bring them down for so long.
Mystery Sale - Quickie Update
We've shipped out about 3/4 of all orders - if you haven't received yours
yet, please be patient! It's on its way! (Again, our thanks for participating in the latest Mystery Sale). We'll do another update after we've completed shipping all of the orders.