My three loyal readers noticed MoonDog Sports was down for a little over a week after my host, Reality Check Network, were the victims of a cyber attack.
At 0600 on October 16, a hacker broke into the Master Boot Record of RCN’s servers and brought down more than 300 web sites.
Of those 300 web sites, several of us were legitimate businesses.
My friends at Double Viking, EgoTV, Next Round, Hollywood Tuna, Manofest and Moe Jackson all saw their sites brought down as a result of the hacker.
But many of those web sites that RCN hosted were bit torrent and porn tube sites, offering content that is generally copyrighted material.
Some suspected that a hired gun for the RIAA or MPAA went after Reality Check to punish it for hosting sites that allowed users to download copyrighted material.
While RCN has released several statements regarding the event, at this point no one knows who’s responsible for the cyber attack. Reality Check’s owner claims he’s contacted the FBI and is working with them to bring the culprit to justice.
Regardless of who performed the deed, it taught me several valuable lessons. Now that I’ve moved the site to a new web host, I’m going to first research the type of sites my host is doing business with.
I’m lucky that my site didn’t lose any of it’s data, but several sites like Hollywood Tuna lost more than half of their photo content.
Losing content when you’ve paid for managed backups is a source of great frustration, costing the site owner a lot of time having to upload that content again – and that’s if he kept the content on a local disk.
But losing content also means that the site’s value is diminished, and for those of us who use the sites as either a primary or secondary source of revenue, that’s extremely infuriating.
I’ll continue to pay the host for backups, but I’m going to perform weekly backups as well and have the data stored off site.
Site owners pay their hosts for a variety of services, not least among them is security.
Any site owner will tell you they have a reasonable expectation that their host has planned for a major event similar to what happened to Reality Check, but whether their host has a contingency plan in place could very well be a different story.
In the case of RCN, the contingency plan to combat a major hacker attack was non-existent.
It took the owner nearly 11 hours to inform site owners what happened and some of us couldn’t get our sites back online for nearly a week.
In stark contrast, my new host tells me that if a cyber attack like this had occurred to them, we would have our sites back online in 48 hours or less.
In defense of RCN, they weren’t a bad host in terms of how the site performed. In fact, MoonDog Sports ran better than it ever had and the cost of hosting the site was very reasonable.
But page load speed and the amount of RAM used per page are only part of what a site owner expects from their web host.
As we all found out, those services RCN performed well weren’t nearly as important as protecting our businesses from hackers.
Many would initially point to the hacker that caused the server crash as the person who most deserves our ire, but the fact is that every web host has a responsibility to its customers that go well beyond maintaining a site.
The situation involving Reality Check isn’t over, with questions that remain unanswered and reimbursement for our losses yet to be determined.
But what isn’t uncertain is how I’ll select a web host from this point forward, using the lessons learned from this event as a guide.
And hopefully the teachable moment this situation created will be a learning tool for every site owner to use.
As you might suspect, there have been a few glitches getting the site squared away with the new host. If you encounter any problems navigating the site, please let me know.
