DDoS Attack on DigitalOcean.com | Hacker News Reader

DDoS Attack on DigitalOcean.com

digitaloceanstatus.com

41 pointseducanon42 comments

These people plague me with condescending adverts on YouTube about how I've been "coding like a beast" and need some "cloud server action".

Perhaps someone finally snapped and DDOS'd them.

You should only see the ad once on YouTube. We do apologize for this. Did you try clearing your cache?

I did not! Do I have to watch it all the way to the bitter end to finally be rid of it? Because I have not done that.

Nice potential-customer-service btw. Thanks! Although I did rather imagine you lot would be all over this thread :-)

Let me know if you're still having problems.

I also see this ad repeatedly. It doesn't bother me at all, but I thought I should comment in case it helps making your campaign more effective.

Just to show you how much it shows up: my WIFE already recognizes it, just from hearing it when I'm working by her side.

I'm sure retargeting works in some context, but I'm guessing you are overdoing it in some cases. (I'm in Brazil, but I browse mostly in English. Maybe it makes me a particular case?).

Re-targeting short term increase in profits, long term increase in irritation and ad-blindness.

Probably the #1 cause for people to install ad-blockers.

@jacquesm - totally agree - retargetting is the sole reason I installed Ad-Block.

Thanks. To add to the guy who said he was in Brazil, I'm in the UK, perhaps it's non-US people who are getting deluged.

> These people plague me with condescending adverts on YouTube about how I've been "coding like a beast" and need some "cloud server action".

Oh please tell me more about how the people helping to support the largest video database in the history of mankind -- available 24/7 at your fingertips for free -- are "plaguing" you with their relevant advertisements that take all of 5 seconds to skip.

If you really want to be a horse's ass, just get adblock and be done with it.

To be fair-- and sorry to DigitalOcean guys that are reading this, but this is honest feedback-- that ad really bugs me. It's got the "rockstar-itus." It's hard to pin down why that feels condescending, but it does.

I hear really good things about the service, though, so kudos to DigitalOcean for that.

I think the issue is that the ads "read" so unauthentically compared to the very positive experience I've had with DO and their wonderful setup tools, documentation, etc.

while the ads are over the top, the core message of "configure how many of those, and how much of that etc" did kind of draw me in.

I don't believe it's YouTube that he's complaining but rather the retargeting campaign by DigitalOcean themselves. I've had a few companies that retarget me on YouTube relentlessly. Ads themselves don't bother me, but seeing the same one dozens of times a day gets irritating.

We can't critique bad youtube ads because youtube is good ? That seems logical.

I think d23 interpreted it to be a complaint against all ads on youtube as opposed to that particular ad being annoying.

Actually, you can take it either way. Saying they're "plaguing" him is ridiculous.

You can potentially install adblock and never see said ad (or any other ad) unless you need to disable adblock. It's a case of simple and effective retargetting.

Adblock works for desktop browser. But I watch youtube on mobile or android media player in app mostly.

There are ad-blockers for Android, they don't even require root on 4.x.

There are also WiFi routers that filter all traffic.

Would you be willing to use a mitm proxy as part of a VPN service to accomplish that?

I hate a lot of ads, but don't really think adblock is fair. If the ads in totality bug me enough, I might stop going to a site, upload elsewhere etc..

UPDATE: The attack has been resolved and the site and control panel are loading normally. Learn more: https://status.digitalocean.com/

Your status page doesn't clearly convey that the issue has been resolved. Perhaps a green bar stating "RESOLVED" at the top in addition to the check mark would make it more clear (in addition to being usable by screen readers).

Noted. Thanks for the feedback.

I work in a DC and DDOSes happen very frequently. Because everyone can hire a botnet for 50 euros, there will be even more coming.

Should I post to HN every time my company gets hit?

Well, it all depends. If it's a major customer affecting outage it should certainly be posted to your guys status page. I imagine you don't work at a HN 'echo-chamber' company like DigitalOcean though, I imagine not many people will be interested in hearing about it here :P.

Yeah, it's quite convenient. When I'm short on cache I just DDOS my biggest competitors.

what is digitalocean? These ddos attacks are kind of like free marketing campaigns :)

DigitalOcean is a webhosting company that offers VPS's.

Similar to Rackspace's Cloud Servers.

Yes. Although Rackspace is absurdly expensive for what I need.

they're a pretty popular cloud hosting site, known for cheap servers equipped with SSDs

It's an Infrastructure as a Service offering like Amazon's EC2, Linnode, Microsoft Azure, or Rackspace. Digital Ocean[1] has seen a sharp rise in popularity lately from developers due to ease of use and high performance VM's.

[1] - https://www.digitalocean.com/

Are their VM's performance on the same level as the others you listed or higher? What do you base the "high performance" comment on?

Yes, at least. For one I believe all DigitalOcean boxes have SSDs. I've found their boxes much better per $ than an EC2 VM. EC2 has a much wider tool suite and is possibly better if you regularly spin machines up and down. YMMV, but for just 'a box' they compete pretty well IMHO.

They differentiate themselves by offering SSDs for all instance sizes + offering a very cheap level ($5). While SSDs won't improve all workloads, I think "high performance" claims compared to the typically IO-weak alternative isn't unreasonable.

Also, they're popular enough now that I'm surprised people haven't heard about them (especially after recent funding)...

I wouldn't say 'high performance VM's' but rather cheap prices.

I recognized their name from Packer.io, for which there is a DigitalOcean-specific builder: http://www.packer.io/docs/builders/digitalocean.html.

Given that it's a fairly new project and DigitalOcean is a relatively unknown cloud (relative to EC2 the other cloud-based builder in Packer.io), I wondered if they had also perhaps contributed heavily to the project. That's another good way to see a sharp rise in popularity from developers!

"are kind of like free marketing campaigns"

While people might laugh at what you are saying in the mid to late 90's many of the well know dot coms of today (ebay for example) got publicity because of bad things happening. People trying to sell things they shouldn't on ebay "my virginity for sale" etc. Always made the news.

I don't believe this was the intent here for sure but I do note that they say: "There is an on-going DDOS attack against digitalocean.com. No hypervisors or customer virtual servers should currently be affected by this attack."

But yet it is on the front page of HN. And now more people know about digitalocean (which has gotten a fair amount of press on HN it's where I heard of them).

As a DigitalOcean customer, I don't see it as a marketing campaign, I see it as them letting their customers know that they are being DDoS'd incase their main site is down or something due to it and the customer thinks their VPS is down too. Just because someone posted it on HN and a few others upvoted it doesn't mean it's marketing.

Marketing... I've seen people converting (catastrophic) human errors in that kind of marketing, where you look so professional dealing with "the attack". Now each time I see DDoS news, I question myself about it.

Yea, status seems accurate at this point, my "Droplets" and Hypervisor seem to be working just fine, well done DigitalOcean team.

Thanks! :)

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