Not everyone on the Internet plays nicely. Recently Harvest has been affected by DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) network attacks directed at sites with equipment physically near our equipment in our primary datacenter. There are some bad forces on the Internet and in the last few weeks there have been two incidents where those bad forces have attacked sites which have nothing to do with Harvest, but unfortunately happen to share a network path into our primary datacenter with our equipment. When these attacks have taken place, the sheer volume of bad traffic has saturated some of those network paths and caused Harvest to be slow for some users. Usually the effects last only a few minutes until the source and destination of the attacks are identified by the datacenter personnel and are removed from the network. Nevertheless, that’s a suboptimal situation for Harvest and our customers.

We’ve taken steps to mitigate the risk of these DDoS issues affecting us in future. Part of this involves moving some of our front facing load balancers to new locations in the primary datacenter where the network pipes are so large that issues of the type we have seen recently will not have any negative impact.

The first set of servers was moved this evening, some users may have noticed Harvest run a little slow for 20 minutes while this work was done. Co-op in particular was slower while we moved. Next week we’ll be moving the rest of the servers and I’ll update you when that work is complete.