New Server Move - Downtime Explanation

On February 2nd at 3:13am EST gruntmods.com and its respective file server was the victim of a DDOS attack. Although we have measures in place to prevent automated attacks against our service there is no such thing as a perfect defense and as such the site was taken offline by our hosting provider until the attack subsided.

Several hours after service was restored at 8am, we again saw an increase in traffic matching the profile of the original DDOS attack. We have taken the following measures to ensure the server is as secure and functional as possible:

• Increased Security: We have raised the protection level with our partners at Cloudflare, bots and other automated systems will have a significantly harder time visiting the site and utilizing any services we offer
• New Server Instances: We have deployed additional server instances and reconfigured these with tighter security settings, to cover us against further attacks through other avenues.
• Server Monitoring: We have implemented file level server monitoring to notify us of suspicious activity on the file server. Going forward, additional monitoring will be put into place on both servers to notify us of any issues that occur before they impact performance.
• Server Redundancy: The Web Server is now located in a Toronto data center, and the file server is located in Montreal. This provides additional protection against issues with specific regional data centers. We are also working with our providers to establish load balancing, which will both improve speeds and availability between different regions, even during peak usage or through similar size DDOS attacks.

We are always working at providing the best possible service and apologize for any interruptions. Transparency is the best policy when it comes to these issues and I hope you continue to enjoy what GruntMods has to offer.