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My Pingdom uptime monitoring tells me the game's uptime has been a pathetic 97.77% over the past 7 days. For comparison, most months are above 99.9% (though there are exceptions). I wanted to quickly share what caused the downtime to assuage any concerns about the game being unstable. There were 2 separate incidents:
Scheduled maintainance (25 minutes of downtime yesterday) - My host periodically needs to apply security updates to the machines the game runs on. I get notified in advance of these update windows and in the past, have announced these. A 2 hour window is typically scheduled, though the update is often done in less than 15 minutes, so I didn't bother posting this time. I had planned on posting an in-game announcement that appears on every page some time before the planned outage began since it was primarily going to be players online at that time that were affected, but...I forgot to do this. :( /shamecube
Host DDoS attack (~3.5 hours over time 3-4 days ago) - My host, Linode, suffered a DDoS attack in the data center the game's hosted in. You may remember that this happened before too. This one is tricky. The Hacker News discussion has some good points on both sides. On one hand, there are ways I could mitigate this. It's not as simple as changing hosts - Linode is one of the biggest providers and pretty much anyone that's not Amazon or Google is susceptible to DDoS. Multi-homing the game at multiple providers would probably effectively mitigate DDoS attacks against a single host, but this would add a lot of complexity to the game's setup (I'm not concerned about the cost factor) for relatively little gain to protect against a somewhat rare (and hopefully decreasing in frequency) kind of attack. I'll certainly reevaluate this position as time goes on, but for now, keeping the game hosted at Linode seems like the right action for a small hobby game.
Anyway, sorry for the downtime and no need to worry - I'm on top of things and get alerted when the game goes down, so I'm always aware of when there's a problem.