Sunday, November 11, 2007

Lunarpages: a sign of the end-times for low end hosting solutions?

My blogs are posted through Google's Blogger, and they've been very reliable for months.

My older web pages however, and several domains, are hosted by Lunarpages. Lunarpages is a low-end to mid-range hosting provider with an above average reputation. I've used them for years and I've been reasonably satisfied.

They're not doing so well lately. They've been down 3 times in the past 10 days, and they've been offline all day today. Only their forums are working. Even several Google Apps domains, where Lunarpages only does redirects, are unavailable because the redirects have failed.

My guess is it's some kind of denial-of-service attack on their DNS servers. The worst part of it is they're maintaining complete radio silence -- no postings at all on their network status. Since their entire domain is unreachable I think that merits a comment or two.

Google has the technical team and infrastructure to handle a pretty massive BOT attack. Lunarpages clearly doesn't. I wonder if that vulnerability is going to wipe out the low end internet services market -- leaving only the big players.

I'll have to start moving off of Lunarpages. It'll take quite a while, but I'll start by moving my domains to the service Google uses for the Google Apps domains I have. The last step will be finding a new home for my legacy web pages.

Update 11/14/07: It looks like this was two problems. Lunarpages had been failing due to DNS attacks, but the failure of the past week was a routing problem with the service my Hotel was using. I didn't have time to debug the routing problem, so I can't say who was ultimately responsible.

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