Ugh... DDOS

What to do when your site is down...

[Livenomadic]

I use a awesome hosting company. Great customer service, great connection speed, and great uptime...until now

This host is under massive DDOS attack and all sites they are hosting are down and have been down for 6 hours now (as of 6:30pm).

The hosting company is working with internap and doing what they can, but for all the clients there is but sit and wait.

No websites, no databases, no email servers...

This is an exceptional situation and reading the different forums (it is currently the second highest thread at #*$!) no customers are angry (how could we be, DDOS is out of their hands), but definitely worried... every minute is another email returned and bot turned away....

There is nothing to do but wait and pray...

I hate DDOS...

[Rosalind]

There's something to be said for mirroring, even though search engine penalties for duplicate content tend to discourage it. This is just such a case when it would come in handy. Or at least you could have another server set up, perhaps with a subdomain pointing to it, especially for messages about outages such as this.

[encyclo]

If you are particularly concerned about this, then you should be keeping your DNS separate from the hosting company and having a short TTL for the domain.

That will allow you to switch hosting providers at short notice with minimal disruption (assuming you can keep stuff like your databases synchronized, obviously).

There are other solutions, but they are only practicable (or, rather, financially viable) if you have a very high-traffic or high-earning site.

In your particular situation, you have little choice other than to sit it out. You can set the transfer in motion to another hosting company, but you risk your original site being available again before the new hosting is fully operational.