If you happened to be using Donor Tools last night about 10:00 PM (CST), you may have felt things grind to a halt. I was working late when I noticed things slowing down considerably, and then stop entirely before coming back online again. All in all, the site was unavailable or really slow between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM (CST).
After checking things out I discovered that the slowdown was a result of unusually high activity at the data center where Donor Tools’ servers are hosted. There was a DOS (Denial of Service) attack going on somewhere on the network that was causing things to slow down everywhere in the datacenter. Basically, a DOS attack means that some bad guy out there decides to inundate some server with millions of requests per second. It would be like you hitting the refresh button on your browser a million times in quick succession. The server gets backed up with all the requests, and starts denying service to legitimate incoming requests.
Even though our servers weren’t the target of the attack, we felt the ripple effect as network bandwidth was sucked up to compensate.
What can you do if you can’t access Donor Tools?
Fortunately, we have several systems in place to handle the occasional unexpected downtime.
First of all, we have regular backups that make sure all data is always safe and locked away. You can also back up your own data. To do this, simply sign in to your account, click “Settings”, and click “Download Backup Archive”. You can keep this archive somewhere safe at your location.
Second, you can easily check the status of the service. To see the report, which shows whether the service is available, and if it’s down, how long it’s been that way, bookmark http://www.pingdom.com/reports/j2ssh5j7kl8x/. This monitoring service will notify us within one minute if Donor Tools has a problem, day or night.
You can also bookmark this blog. Since it’s hosted on WordPress, it’s on a completely different network, and should keep running even if the main site is down.
This was a relatively minor malfunction, and fortunately, our servers weren’t affected. However, it has prompted us to take some additional proactive steps to make sure that we can quickly respond to any problems that come up in the future.
If you have any questions please feel free to call or email, and we’ll be glad to help.
Thanks!
Ryan Heneise
Owner/Developer
