Very soon, PurgeHosting will no longer offer free hosting services. The sign-ups we get daily are extremely overwhelming and put frankly, our servers can’t handle it. A new, tiny package, will be made available to purchase as a replacement for free hosting.

We started our free hosting services as a way it bring in traffic, more than 3 years ago. And it’s simply not necessary anymore. We think it’s important to focus on the customers who pay us for our services, rather than those who don’t. While there are many active free hosting clients who genuinely use our services for good, there are others who simple abuse them. This abuse, effects the reliable customers who need the service and this is why we think it’s an unnecessary product.

Over the next few weeks (with periodic posts in the news) the free hosting services will come to a stop, and the new package will be announced. First things first, new sign-up’s will be disabled, and inactive accounts will be terminated.

Sorry it took so long everyone, but the blog finally matches the rest of the site, as it should.

About a week ago, we noticed some drive failure errors on the ph03 server here at PurgeHosting.com. We immediately took the initiative to make plans and take care of this before matter got worse. Thanks to our server cluster, we were able to successfully migrate over 900 websites with little to no downtime.

After running diagnostics on the server’s main drive, it was determined that a new drive was needed, which also meant doing an OS Reload on the box. This is always bad news, and no one enjoys dealing with this, but luckily, thanks to ThePlanet the whole process went very smoothly.

It took a total of 21 hours to transfer the accounts to another server in the cluster. We rerouted all traffic appropriately, and 24 hours we took the server down for the reload. Less than 2 hours later, the server was back online and reconfigured with the PurgeHosting network. 24 hours after that, we transferred all the accounts back to the ph03 server, which took another 21 hours.

In the end, we had successfully reloaded over 900 accounts in just under 4 days on a server with a failing drive, since replaced. A big thanks goes out to the staff at PurgeHosting, and of course, ThePlanet.

It’s not news anymore that our main server was under a huge DDoS attack for more than two weeks. But it can finally be said, the attack has ended. Over the last two weeks, we were in constant communication with ThePlanet (Our DC), who had a Cisco Guard with custom proxy templates loaded. Here’s the low-down:

Peak Malicious Traffic Mitigated: 684 MBPS
Average Malicious Traffic: 400MBPS
Total Time for Attack: Over 300 Hours

I can’t even begin to imagine the total amount of traffic filtered, it’s easily in the Terabytes. The server was absolutely taking a pounding from this attack without the Cisco Guard online. Once we had the Guard mitigating the traffic, operation returned to almost normal, and for one reason. The traffic was not easy to filter, we have thousands of visitors daily who access the server, in other-words; lot’s of legitimate traffic we don’t want to filter.

Unfortunately, during the attack, many people experienced random outages and questionable connectivity to the server under the attack. This was not because the server was down, but because the Cisco Guard was filtering non-malicious traffic by mistake.

By the 10th day, we had figured out exactly what to block, and by what means to do it. Normally it wouldn’t take us nearly this long to properly mitigate an attack, but this was such a massive DDoS attack, that it took us this long to track down exactly where it was coming from. We ad to sift through thousands of spoofed IP’s.

Once we had this solved, there was no more questionable connectivity for random visitors, and a custom proxy template to better mitigate the malicious traffic. Less than 48 hours later, the attack had ended, presumable because the attacker gave up.

Big thanks goes out to PurgeHosting Staff and ThePlanet NOC Team.

Last week, thanks to ThePlanet, we had a chance to get picture of one of our servers down at the DC. Kevin Hazard ran a fun and very short campaign and a “Mission”  ThePlanet customers had to complete to earn this picture. Of course, we jumped right on it. The campaign was called ShowMeMyServer, and here was our Mission:

1. Post a Tweet saying “I’m Powered by @ThePlanet. #showmemyserver”
2. Post a comment on this blog that includes “My website is _________, and I’m Powered by The Planet.”
3. Send an email to twitter @ theplanet.com with the name you want included in the picture (or we’ll default to your Twitter name), your The Planet account number* and the IP address** of the server you want pictured.

We had these tasks completed within 15 minutes and sure enough, a few days later we got that picture of our main server. And I thought we should share it with everyone else!

Click for High Res!