Why did we do this? Because we've been having DoS attacks (Denial of Service attacks) which have been ongoing ever since early Saturday morning, March 14, 2020. We've also had smaller attacks at various times, as recently as a few weeks ago. These are not attacks that will damage or do anything "bad" to our server, website or this forum. Instead, this is simply a number of "bots" or "robot computers" that hit various networks on a regular basis, for various reasons. They do not inject malware or viruses into a server, but instead they "deny service" to our regular members by flooding the server with so much non-member traffic (hits) that the server slows down, and if there's enough of these "bots" doing it at the same time, the old server (on occasion) became non-responsive, because I've configured the forum software to shut the forum down with an error message if server resources hit a certain high level.
Our Atlanta, Georgia datacenter (where our server is housed) is monitoring these attacks and doing the best they can with their network equipment that our server uses to connect to the Internet. Also, we have now upgraded and configured several things on our own server so that we are better equipped to absorb or handle more traffic during events like this, and repel unwanted "bot" traffic. We also have a very robust firewall and several other software solutions to help in this regard.
So while you may notice some slowness when these attacks hit a high point, we hopefully will not have to shut down the forum as we did with the old server.
We will be having a fund-raising thread shortly if anyone would like to help by donating towards these upgrades, that would be greatly appreciated. (Donation link is HERE).
Again, sorry for the disruptions that have occurred during the past 3 days.
With this new server upgrade, I think we'll be a lot more stable.
Apnea Board Administrator
www.ApneaBoard.com
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