Well, we thought we were out of the wooods, and then we got kicked in the teeth. Yesterday, our ISP received a sustained DDOS attack starting at 3am. For those of you geekers out there, you know how bad that is. They finally resolved the situation at about 6pm last night.

Our apologies, again, and contrary to what it might seem, we are working ferociously for a more stable environment.

- Gonz

Gonz,
Relax. I'm also a data processing professional, although I do little work with the internet. Computer failures are common. It's normal to experience them considering the level of technology that exists today. So this doesn't bother me as long as you're trying to correct it.

Yes, you can reduce downtime with redundancy of hardware but this can be very expensive and you, probably, don't need that. What you can to do is estimate the lost profit that would occur from a day or week of downtime, including the intangible cost of a disgruntled customer. Then find out how much it would cost to reduce the risk of that downtime. With that you can determine the level of redundancy that is cost effective for your business.

May I suggest that you determine a policy that will govern the auction in the event that the system becomes unavailable, such as rolling the closing date forward or something like that. Then publish this policy as part of the bid rules.

And in my interest to learn as much as possible, what is a DDOS attack? And,Robby, what is SLA, service level availability?

Thanks

Tandem401

A DDOS is a distributed denial of service attack. And SLA is Service Level Agreement. An SLA from your provider says if you're down, they pay! We have several % budgeted for SLA payouts... Several % on over 100 million in revenue adds up... DDOS attacks are a fact of life on the internet, just as being attacked on this board (unprovoked) is getting to be a fact of life... What's important is how your ISP handles it, just as important as a nice vantage point to someone’s front door... Where's my tree stand...