Free Web site hosting service Yola suffered a denial of service (DOS) attack yesterday, which affected all hosted sites.
DOS attacks involve the flooding of servers with nonsense data, which overloads them and prevents legitimate traffic from reaching sites.
Users who bought domains from Yola have had those domains moved to an alternate IP address. Yola has provided instructions for other users to point their domains to the new Yola address.
“This unfortunately happens to many companies on the Web. There are just people who like to do malicious things. We're not the first site to experience this, and we won't be the last. We'll continue to do everything possible to protect our service and our customers from these kinds of attacks in the future,” says the company.
Yola started in 2006 as Synthasite, a South African start-up. It has now become international and is based in the US. The site offers a similar service to (now defunct) Yahoo Geocities. Users can host basic Web sites free of charge, or pay for their own domain name and design or SEO services.
Yola asserts that, while it has state-of-the-art defences in place, these proved to be insufficient in this case. The company has brought in a global Web security firm to assist with the improvement of these defences.
“Regardless of the reasons, your Web site was down. Please know that however frustrated we were with the situation, we understand you were more so. We're very sorry,” says CEO Vinny Lingham.
Most sites are back up; however, a tweet from the company says: “It can take 2-24 hours for DNS settings to propagate and system cache to clear.”
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