Hi,
I just received an email from infinity my hits limit is reached. I only use my website as a design portfolio that isnt even shared a few times a month with individuals.
I have been working on my website for the last few days with uploading changes. Im guessing this has contributed to the hits. I also added a few video slideshows on the homepage.
Im not a tech expert or even know about what CSS or other jargon means. I read all the recommended articles that infinity sent to me but Im still puzzled. I also viewed some similar topics on here but cant understand how my site reached this limit.
Id be more than happy to delete whatever is causing my website to overload like this, Im just not sure what is making it overload. The only thing I can think of is the multiple upload changes yesterday.
I was just going to ask if someone can view my website to tell me what possibly can be causing the hit limiter but my website is taken down.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
Chad
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If you take a look inside the control panel, you’ll see that your account received a MASSIVE hit spike. It was so big that the red limit line is basically at the bottom of the graph.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s most likely that your website was the target of an attack. While actively using a site can result in high hits usage, it’s very hard to make the hits usage go this high.
Unfortunately, all I can do is guess. We don’t store the full access logs for your website, we only count the number of hits, so there is no way to know for sure what the traffic looked like or where it came from.
Thank you so much for all the information and looking into this. This is so alarming because I dont know much about technology and dont know how or why someone would focus on my website. I dont even have anything but my design work on there so its just to view, no customers, nothing to buy so how can this be? Is this like a computer virus that goes through peoples websites and gets information?
What can we do to protect my website from this? I feel like Im helpless just sitting here while if it keeps overloading the servers I might get kicked off of infinity and I didnt even do anything to break the rules.
Is there anyway to see behind the scenes what is causing it, like is it a design slideshow or something or if its a bot? Like I said in my original post, Id be more than happy to delete any design video slideshow or whatever if its causing this overload to happen. Just let me know what I can do on my end to get this overloading to stop.
Also, tonight I received an email at 10:40pm PST saying my website is up and running again. Four minutes later at 10:44pm PST I received another email stating my account has been suspended again and shut down and might not be a member anymore.
Please let me know what can I do on my website to block these crazy people or bots on the internet. I feel like they or it is sabotaging my ability to be on infinity and have a website.
Unfortunately, the reality of the type of attacks that overload systems is that there is not a lot you can do about them. Sometimes it’s possible to implement some deterrents depending on the nature of the attack, but if the goal of the attack is just to overload your website, then all you can do is either to buy enough capacity to handle the attack or accept the downtime.
Like I said, we don’t store the actual logs of the hits, so we have no way to see what the traffic looked like.
While a poorly coded gallery can result in high hits usage, the hits usage of your account is so high that it seems unlikely to me that this could cause that.
Preventing attacks like this can be a full time job with huge amounts of money required.
Even if logs existed to the point where you knew who (or at least what IPs) were causing the attacks, there still is not all that much you can do about it (One would think block it, but the request is still reaching the server so it can still overload it, blocked or not). One way to actually (maybe) keep your server alive is to have another server with more capacity take the damage instead, if you have a custom domain, this is possible with IF (see below).
You haven’t mentioned your domain name, but if it is a paid custom domain you can try setting up Cloudflare on “I’m under attack” mode, that should be able to stop a lot of it.
Or outright impossible at times. I work for Experian (not in the credit reference side, I work in our IT services department, mostly testing web saftey tools) and our server is under almost contstant attack.
Thank you for the additional information. Ive never worked in tech nor have ever had a website have this problem before so Im really in the clouds about it all.
My concern now is I just dont want to get kicked off of Infinity because these fools are attacking my website and overburdening the servers. Since its not my doing this on my website am I ok?
Typically do you know how many day or weeks this type of website attacks last? Im just trying to see how much longer my site will have to deal with this.
I wish another page notification could be applied like “Site under reconstruction” or something versus suspended. I wouldnt want anyone to visit my website and think Im not reliable for not having my website up because it says suspended in the address bar.
Today I didnt receive any emails stating my site was back up and running or suspended again. So I checked on the main panel but it wouldnt let me in. It said dont go on the forum to fix this click here. So I didnt want to do that until I spoke with you on here first to see what your advice is.
Sorry for the long message. Thanks for all your time and help!
Sometimes its targeted (like my employer, people don’t like that we hold massive amounts of data on the general public in the UK, and dont understand its to help them get credit when they need it)
sometimes its just random.
Sometimes your just an innocent caught in the crossfire.
Unfortunately no. If this continues your site will be considered a “target for attacks” and will be removed.
Depends on the person attacking you. Could be small, could be absolutely huge:
Assuming you mean client area … if it prompts you to open a ticket the suspension is permanent and you need to do that if you want your website back.
Just because you’re not the one causing it doesn’t mean it’s OK.
The fact is still that our server is being flooded by someone targeting your website, which can impact other websites on the same server.
It could be 15 minutes, it could be 15 days. Nobody knows.
If your account exceeds the hits limit, it will be suspended. If the account is suspended, it shows a suspension page.
It get that some people might take it as a sign saying your website might not be trustworthy. But right now, it’s hard for the system to distinguish between suspension types and show different pages.
Thank you for the update. I opened a support ticket. I also requested if they could remove my four design slideshows on the bottom of my homepage maybe that’s what’s making the website go wild.
The only reason I’m thinking it might be that is shortly after I updated my website like the next day it got overloaded.
So maybe if someone in tech can delete them and allow the site to go up without the slideshows maybe it will operate normal?
I put in a support ticket so I’ll see what steps they recommend next.
I appreciate everyone’s time and help with this!
Despite your wishful thinkings, unfortunately, if it was due to a massive attack, then even if your website have nothing at all, it will trigger the suspension eventually.
You can of course remove the slideshow, but the best thing you can do is probably just wish that the attack can stop.
Yeah the only reason I was thinking maybe it was the four slideshows was because literally after updating the website with the stuff it got suspended.
So I know I’m not a tech person I was just thinking what is the probability that the site would be attacked right after an update versus something wrong with the updated items?
I opened the ticket to see what to do next for the website but wanted to get your opinion.
Since it says each client can have 3 websites do you think I should just upload the website to a new address?
I wish there was a way to put the website up just to see if the web attacks still going on and then I could shut it down and try back in a few weeks.
