(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A number of sites that flickered off-and-on late last week due to a Distributed Denial of Service attack came back online at 5pm Friday according to affected domain registrar and hosting provider Network Solutions (www.networksolutions.com).
According to an official blog post by Network Solutions head of social media strategy, Shashi Bellamkonda, spikes in domain name system queries caused an intermittent disruption of normal DNS query resolution. DNS, being what ties a domain name to a specific server, caused sites to give visitors a “server not found” error message.
These traffic spikes, caused by a DDoS attack that flooded Network Solutions servers with traffic, lasted two to four hours on Thursday and Friday. For security reasons, Network Solutions declined to go into specifics about the attack.
“Taking steps to mitigate the DDOS attack, Network Solutions Operations Department estimates that 48 percent to 62 percent of the queries were being responded to successfully during that period,” Bellamkonda noted. “While we do continually take measures to prevent these and other types of issues, unfortunately circumstances like this that deal with third parties are beyond our control.”
This situation illustrates the importance of redundant DNS hosting. Earlier in January, the WHIR reported about hosting provider Server Intellect (www.serverintellect.com) offering geographically-redundant DNS hosting at no extra charge to all customers, providing greater uptime, faster DNS response times and increased reliability.
