MoneysavingExpert.com...going down the pan?

jockettuk

Well said martin and keep up the good work .. I for one am totally grateful for all your help in issues i have problems with always someone on here with a helpful answer..


I check out MSE before i go and do any shopping to make sure i get the best deal..

Thanks again and well done on sorting out the bugs :beer:

superscaper

MSE_Martin wrote: »

I've hardly slept due all this and am already overloaded; so are my team.

This is why it annoys me so much when people start accusing you and the MSE team of "not doing enough". It's blatantly obvious to most how much effort is put into the site (although even then I'm sure we're underestimating it).

As I've said before the downtime of the site has been very minimal, especially considering the scale of the problems faced. I've seen much smaller sites knocked offline for weeks from less serious problems.

Iom-rf

superscaper wrote: »

So when did that happen? I've only noticed two times it's been down. One was for the attack which would have been impossible to preemptively defend against, the other time was when they were physically transferring to different servers, which is exactly what you're asking them to do and again it's impossible to keep the site up when doing that. Neither time did it crash because of normal use. Whenever any other site goes through that they are invariably offline for a lot longer than MSE was so I can't see how doing something better than everyone else makes it lacking in "better management". Surely the opposite it true!.

Neither of them where possible to prevent (although there is measures that could be put in place), but the site could've been up alot quicker after those two events, there could've been measures in place for if/when an attack like that happened they knew exactly what to do.

I'm not ungrateful in the slightest, but this isn't a one man band site with just Martin doing everything, Martin has employed people to do a job, most other sites would have been up within hours, instead the attackers actually got what they wanted, caused major disruption and the site was down for (2) plus days, costing Martin both time, money and users. (so knowing what they can do, its quite a big possibility they'll do it again, so people do need to prepare), I read one post of Martins that said daily backup's are done, but there was a mixup and only a monthly backup was done by the webserver guys.

Please show me one of these big sites (ie this amount of users/the size of this database) thats down for 1 day+.

Iom-rf

superscaper wrote: »

This is why it annoys me so much when people start accusing you and the MSE team of "not doing enough". It's blatantly obvious to most how much effort is put into the site (although even then I'm sure we're underestimating it).

As I've said before the downtime of the site has been very minimal, especially considering the scale of the problems faced. I've seen much smaller sites knocked offline for weeks from less serious problems.

Now I'm not having a go but Martin has just confirmed that there are now measures in place to prevent such an attack that caused all these problems in the first place and also the issue with backup's has also been highlighted. I feel that possibly someone attacked simply due to the size of the site and next to no security

I think people are misunderstanding my posts though, A) I do realise how hard Martin and his team have been working, I'm grateful for the site, but I was suprised that a DDOS (one of the most simple attacks) was the method of choice, probably because of the poor prevention measures.

I'm not wanting argue/disagree any further though, I enjoy the site, I like the openness of the site and I feel most users can connect with Martin because he isn't just an Admin, he is actually a poster aswell, I won't be leaving any time soon (well through choice at least!), but the OP did have a point and I just felt that people didn't see the bigger picture other than "Martins site"...

superscaper

Iom-rf wrote: »

but I was suprised that a DDOS (one of the most simple attacks) was the method of choice, probably because of the poor prevention measures.

Simple???? I'm sorry, but the way DDOS is scaleable there are NO prevention measures in existence that can defend against any DDOS attack. I'm sure Martin's put in place the best prevention methods possible but if the people controlling the botnets were determined there's nothing you can do. They're able to disrupt entire countries internet capabilities. You talk about it as if it was something easy to stop but these are THE MOST effective type of attack and AFAIK noone has ever been caught and prosecuted for a DDOS as at best it only leads the police to ordinary home users' PCs. There really is little Martin or his tech team could have done to prevent it.

Iom-rf

Depends as you say on the scale of attack the prevention measures are basically stopping any constantly repetitive i.p addresses (although you then get problems incase its someone genuine) or for when there is an attack to spread the load onto all of the servers, the only other thing is to sit and wait to repair the damage as quick as possible.

marleyboy

Im sure MSE will have this site back to normal in no time, a lot of us regulars will never give up fighiting by your side to ensure the site would never go down the pan