Bears-cave, like anyone else hosted by HostingMatters, has been down today due to a DOS (Denial of Service) attack on one of HostingMatters’ clients. In this case, the client is a privately run site that publically ‘outs’ chat rooms and message boards that are used for terrorist activity. The members of those boards and chats decided to get even (and AT&T frankly seems to have no real way of dealing with that).

But that’s not the point of this post.

While all the sites were down and being re-IP’d and so forth, I had a chance to poke around the ‘emergency’ forums that have been set up by HostingMatters in preparation for just such an event as this — under a different domain, using different machines, there is little chance that both these boards and the main servers will go down at the same time, barring catastrophe. (Yes, they actually set that up beforehand, and they actually put information there. Shocking.)

Anyway, reading the boards led me to a not-so-startling discovery: people are idiots.

Specifically, I’m speaking of the folks freaking about and threatening to find another hosting service over this DOS adventure. The idea that someone could look at the last couple days and think “I need to go somewhere where the Host is reliable.” is the most laughable, sad thing I can imagine. Those folks suggesting that moving to another host will rid them of such difficulties are only displaying their pitiable lack of comprehension regarding the way the internet works. (And a mind-numbing innocence regarding the quality of most host’s technical support.)

These attacks happen. Sadly, they happen for a lot of lousy, reprehensible reasons, but that’s not the important part of the equation; that’s not what matters. What matters is how the hosts deal with it. What matters is the service. What matters is the commitment. Those qualities in a Host are as rare as gold.

HostingMatters is blessed with a staff that goes the extra mile, works extra hours, and makes the extra effort (and it is extra effort) to keep their clients notified of exactly what’s going on.

Some other host? Roll the dice, because it’s a crapshoot.

I’ve been with over a dozen providers since ‘92. I’ve never seen a team as dedicated, pleasant, and professional as this one — I’d be proud to be a part of a team like that in any arena (even as, in this case, a client), and all I can say is this: HostingMatters has my support and my (meager) business.

They are the best people I could have on my side on a day like today and I just want to publically commend and recommend them.

We loveses Doyce. ***Dave, too.

Ditto what Doyce said.

Telling to me was that, after all was said and done and services were back up and normal help desk ticket stuff being taken, further information on the DoS attack and what HM had been doing was posted. I mean, these guys had been up for many, many, many hours, dealing with a terrible situation (and fending off brickbats from yahoos), and before they went home, they made sure that the questions that had been asked were answered.

Damn, they're good.

You want to know what should really put the halo on these guys? Check this out:

We faced a bit of an issue determing what credits (if any) should be applied to client accounts due to these issues: the actual impacting event was out of our control, and the inaccessibility of the servers was not due to fault within our network itself or as a hardware issue. We will not be receiving any SLA-related compensation ourselves, but thought some sort of credit was in order for our clients base, all of whom were affected by this and as frustrated by it as we were. A credit based on the actual percentage of inaccessibility (2%) or even rounding up to a full day (3.33%) were possibilities of assigning this credit, but we rejected both. Instead, we will be assigning a 6% credit (2% total impact time times 3 days) to each client against the monthly calculated fee for their account.

Pretty much any other ISP would have pointed at their SLA and said, "Sorry, out of our control," and let the matter drop.

These guys are compensating their customers triple what was considered to be equitable for the outage. Admittedly, it's not going to amount to much more than a refund of a little over a dollar for me, but the gesture is huge compared to what's expected in the industry.

I want to buy these folks some good alcohol. They're already going to be on my Thanksgiving List.

Indeed. Indeed.