Good day folks, just a very quick update on the site issues experienced over the last two days.
I am sure many of you will have figured, and indeed correctly that we were being DDOS'ed, which was making it difficult or even impossible to access the website.
In answer to your queries, yes we did have DDOS protection, and no, it was not a hack, all data is still safe, and backed-up and redundant copies kept off-site.
So why is this happening. Two main reasons, one, almost any successful site (like ours) will get DDOS extortion demands, ie - Pay us money or we attack your site - and two, we are COMPETITION!
The first reason we can and have been dealing with easily, and can be ignored as the defences we have are more than adequate and have been proven to block anything they can throw at us.
Th second are much more insidious, we never get any demands for this type of attack, it just happens and they are sustained and vicious. These are carried out by pros. We were expecting these and we did have measures in place but unfortunateley they were just not up to the task.
Before opening TriDeci we re-evaluated our service providers in the aim of improving performance as well as reliability.
Even though we have been promised improvements by our new providers, it seems they have not been up to the task and this has neccessitated firstly moving our server infrastructure back to our old provider, which is now complete and we are very happy with their stability, even though it may be slightly slower at times.
And now we are moving our DDOS protection, and this may take another 24 hours or so and the site may be inaccessible at times so please bear with us.
Hindsight is a great thing, if we had stuck with what we had before we would have been at least double our 2250 members today which has been achieved in just 8 days online. But hey, we were trying to make sure we had the best facilities and until they were real world tested, we were none-the-wiser.
Yes we have listened to your past feed-back. We are doing our best to improve communication and access and response to your issues
We have a very fine team of people under Marc Freidberg who is in charge of training, who are providing live online support via GVO Conf and Skype. Access links to these can be found in your back office under the support tab. Please make use of them, these are essential resources if you do not yet understand the potential and opportunity that TriDeci offers you.
We are setting up an out-of-band support server today for support tickets, until our back-office support system is completed.
We will also make available a special members-only link in case the public site goes down.
And we will be adding further resources to our backend to cope with any additional demands. Our setup already runs across numerous load balanced and redundant servers, so if it does go down, its not because of some minor incident.
And I would like to see the TriDeci continues on for more than just a couple of years. Most of those who know me will tell you that we always keep our sites running for at least two years, even if there is barely one or two of you active and everyone has moved on to the Next-Big-Thing, and we definitely will not just disappear in a month or two.
Sure I may not be the most communicative, I would rather the site speaks for itself, and rather than blathering on about how this is the next big thing, I prefer that results are what are measured. Walk the Walk!
So thats where we are at. Without all these issues we would have been able to complete the site design and resources days ago and be well prepared for our March 1st launch.
So lets move on, lets hit 10000 members before we are 4 weeks old.
Kind Regards
Sean,
TriDeci Admin.