Hey my name is Keith and to those who don’t know me, I’m the owner of bmindful.com.
If you visited the site last weekend or over the Christmas break you might have found that bmindful.com wasn’t accessible for large periods of time. I wanted to write this post to let you know what happened.
First up I just wanted to assure everyone that no data was lost or compromised during the recent outage. In fact the server this site is hosted on wasn’t affected and the problem occurred further up the chain in the data centre the server is hosted in.
I understand there is no need to get too technical point, but if you will allow me I just want to give you a short explanation of what happened.
Around Christmas day someone (for reasons unknown at this time) began sending a large amount of bad data to the hosting company we use (called linode) the traffic sent was so large that their routers (the black / beige box you have in your home to connect to the internet) weren’t able to handle the good traffic. This form of attack is known as a Distributed Denial Of Service attack (DDoS) Currently the only way to combat this form of attack is to use a more powerful router than the amount of traffic being sent.
Our hosting company has now done this and managed to overpower the DDoS attack which is currently still ongoing. Its likely that given enough time the attacker will move on to another target. There are a lot of criminal gangs on the internet who use DDoS attacks to extort money for protection, similar to how the mafia would operate.
This attack was not directed at us but rather the entire data centre. We were simply unfortunate casualties of the attack.
Now onto some more reassuring information.
All your data on bmindful is backed up hourly and replicated to three different locations. We store 12 months worth of backups stored on a rolling basis. If anything were to happen to this site we have the backups to recover your affirmations, posts, comments and everything else stored on the site.
I have prepaid for 12 months hosting of the site and intend to continue renewing hosting every 12 months. bmindful.com is a long term project for me and I intend to keep it around for many years to come.
However if I did ever decide to close bmindful.com then my promise to you all is to give you all at least 12 months notice and provide a way for you to export all your data out of the site before it shutdown.
Finally I intend to start improving bmindful.com in 2016 we will see a lot of the rough edges of the site being improved. Firstly with more forum spaces and topics, the ability to be able to remove posted comments and a much improved text editor to make it easier and simpler to write posts.
I wish you all a happy and prosperous 2016 and look forward to see you in the forums.