Site Repair Progress Report

Since afternoon April 9th, our site was not accessible because of the necessary changes we have to make to our domain name server. We have arranged our website to be guarded by a 3rd party service against the ever escalating attacks of our site. It was supposed to be a simple change and once the information has propagated through the internet the site would return to normal. Well, that was what I thought.

When A Server Goes Haywire, It Becomes An Adventure

Instead, we went through a 30-hour marathon of emergency repair.

One failure from one end point turns into another failure at another part of the server. By midnight we knew the site was beyond repair thus we went for restoration of our website from backup. We managed to piece together a barely running website at around 9 am Eastern Time. Talking about perfect timing there.

The backup of the website we have has posts and other contents up to April 8th in the morning. The rest of the site has to be reconstructed and reconfigured so that the site can run smoothly again. Many thanks to the tech support team from our hosting company servint.net. They pulled us through every obstacle throughout the ordeal.

There Are Two Good Reasons For Going Into So Much Trouble

The way our site being harassed by spam bots, hostile crawlers and pure evil DDoS attacks has been growing quickly since mid 2013. Although we have done a good job in protecting our website through standard measures, they are by no means enough to handle the hostilities at the current level we have witnessed.

We have several choices to deal with the problem. I picked the one that is most scalable. Should there be more attacks, our site will have a much better chance to survive. Since we are offering premium services, it is the least thing we can do to ensure our premium members can access the premium reports and real-time tools.

By having the protection service in place, it also improves the overall efficiency of our server because it is also a CDN (content delivery network) service. It means that the real-time bias reporting tool I’ve planned to release will be able to deliver real-time signals and biases on time even under tough server load conditions. This second reason alone is good enough for me to take the steps we’ve taken to secure the site.

Outstanding Issues

At this point daytradingbias.com is fully functional with a few exceptions due to the outage that happened on and off since April 8th.

The exceptions are:

1. Part of the real-time commentaries transcript from April 8th to 10th are missing. We should be able to pull out the records from another backup and have that restored by this weekend.

2. The posts I made over the past 2 days were missing but I managed to find my local copy. I have them uploaded to the site already.

3. Some forum comments and comments on articles are now gone. Depending on the progress of data recovery over the weekend, we may be able to restore the messages but I do not have high hope on that due to the complexity.

4. Some of the premium reports for April 8th – 10th are missing. The premium reports for April 11th (tomorrow) are all posted properly today.

5. Ad placements are all missing because their database records are destroyed by the server side changes. Obvious the server has a distinct taste of computer records to destroy. All my articles and reviews are intact but the ads were wiped out.

Thank You

Thank you all for being patient with us when the site was down.

Share