All the websites have been going up and down. The site hosts have just emailed this.

I wanted to personally reach out to you and shed some light on the recent service interruptions we’ve experienced. Over the past few days A2 Hosting has been the target of several large-scale Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attacks.

These malicious attacks are orchestrated by criminals who control large compromised networks of computers called botnets. The compromised computers are used to flood target networks with millions of requests thus overwhelming them and causing service interruptions. Even companies like Netflix, Twitter and PayPal have suffered these attacks and experienced outages over the past year. You can read more about some of these events HERE.

We believe these attacks are deliberately directed at A2 Hosting, as opposed to any particular customer.

We regularly mitigate many small to medium-scale DDoS attacks without our customers even noticing. However, these recent attacks have been unprecedented in magnitude and therefore have been more difficult to deal with. Many of the recent attacks have been over 40Gbps in size with the largest being over 120Gbps. In comparison, the size of a typical DDoS attack tends to be around 1-2Gbps.
What We Have Done:
We are already partnered with a new DDoS mitigation vendor who has helped us develop a tactical approach to dealing with and, more importantly, reducing the efficacy of these large-scale attacks.

We have evaluated the root cause of the outages
We are actively implementing updates to better protect ourselves
We are carefully monitoring for future attacks
We are also implementing long-term infrastructure upgrades to further protect us in the future from even larger attacks

So What Now?
We will work with the appropriate authorities to investigate these attacks, shut down these malicious botnets, and try to bring those responsible to justice.

We want to thank our customers for their patience and understanding, our staff for their willingness to go the extra mile, and our vendors for working with us diligently to try to resolve the problems.

On behalf of the entire A2 Team, I want to sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. We fully understand the importance of your sites’ uptime and I want to personally assure you that we do not take these type of service interruptions lightly. We will learn from this experience and implement necessary improvements.
Sincerely,

Bryan Muthig
Founder/CEO
A2 Hosting