jecasc - 3:51 pm on Oct 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

This morning I received an email. Somebody threatened to take my server down with a DDos Attack if I don't pay a certain amount of money. I thought it was a simple SPAM Scaremail and didn't think much about it. In the afternoon however traffic to my website suddenly spiked until it was not available anymore. Luckily my hosting company offers a pretty good service and automatically transfered my whole website to an high performance server. So after half an hour my website was available again, though slower. The DDos attack continues however. Website is quite slow.

Any ideas what to do in such a situation? Besides the obvious - like contacting the police.

My hosting company says the high performance server is pretty much the best they can offer, this would be about all they can do in such an event.

What would you do? Pay the money? Prepare yourself for the next wave?

Any ideas how to prepare for the worst case? Get a second hoster so I can reroute traffic? Block certain IP ranges? I am a little at loss here. Don't have much experience for such cases.