@dannyz

This was true before we added DDOS mitigation, but is not true now.

— Bill

Just thought I’d write up how my hosting search turned out…

I got quotes from MindGeek’s host, Reflected Networks (recommended by GetPaidMark), and from WebAir (recommended by Roger & Rob @ My Gay Cash), and then also got a quote from NatNet (my current host).

I grilled Reflected and WebAir on how they handle DDOS attacks (having seen NatNet handle DDOS attacks I didn’t need to grill them – I’ve seen it first hand).

Reflected’s network engineer said that all traffic is mitigated prior to entering their network (or rather, much of it is currently and all will be in the coming months). So his comment was “you’ll never notice DDOS attacks, because they never get to your server”. I grilled them further on whether there were types of attacks that were hard to mitigate and they were pretty confident in saying they can mitigate pretty much any type of attack. To be specific they mitigate level 3 and 4 (protocol-based attacks) and level 7 attacks (web/HTTP-based attacks).

Honestly, I think all the good hosts will have this level of protection in the next couple years. It sorta defeats the whole idea of DDOS attacks. I mean what’s the point of doing a DDOS attack if the person you’re attacking never notices the attack?

Then the CTO of WebAir told me about their DDOS mitigation. They have a rather expensive DDOS mitigation package that lets customers fine tune how the mitigation is done (it pretty much doubled the cost of their hosting). But all customers get free mitigation for attacks that are >1.5 Gbps (levels 3, 4 & 7). When I mentioned that Reflected says “you’ll never notice the attack”, he said “they have their thresholds, we have our thresholds”. That sorta made me rethink Reflected’s claim, but still, after that talk I was slightly more comfortable with Reflected’s (promised) level of service than WebAir’s – at least at my price point – WebAir is probably superior if you get their bells & whistles DDOS protection package, but it just isn’t something I can afford.

Both Reflected and WebAir have in-house staff mitigating attacks. As I understand NatNet’s capability (from seeing it in action 6-7 months ago), when you’re under attack their network guys redirect your traffic to a third party mitigation company and then bring the cleaned traffic back to their data center. Both Jay (at StandAhead) and I can attest that it works, but since it’s a third party, if the attack is goes on for days and days, it can start to get expensive. I’m guessing NatNet will move to an in-house capability in the not-too-distant future since they’re generally on top of things and that’s the direction the industry is moving, but meanwhile they do have a solid, working solution, which is all that’s really important to me.

So by this point in my investigation all three hosts were competent enough to go with – it really came down to price. And as I looked at my needs more closely I realized I had three needs – 1) a server that can serve PHP/MySQL quickly, 2) a CDN that can serve images and other small files quickly, and 3) a cheap way to serve videos. I didn’t need to just use one host – I could split those functions up.

I started hearing some negative feedback about Reflected (people seem to either love them or hate them), so when they came in with a really high (over-spec’d) quote for the server I figured I’d just use them for serving videos since they had a cheap and “good enough” CDN for that purposes.

In the end NatNet came up with a comprehensive quote that wasn’t quite as cheap as some of the other options, but close enough that I didn’t see the need to move anything away from them. Their CDN (Highwinds) is better than I need for videos. We’ll see how it performs with images. I’m not getting the JPEGMini integration I wanted when I was going to use CloudFront – so I’ve gotta figure that out. But over all it’s a good solution for me, and if I’m not quite happy with how it serves images I can always move them to CloudFront or CloudFlare.

I’m actually pretty excited about the server I’m getting with NatNet. It’ll have two RAIDs in it – one SSD (for the important stuff), and one SATA (for archived stuff). And it’ll have a faster procesor than I have now. I’m hoping all this will result in much faster load times for my pages. Fingers crossed!