Web Projects, Travel, and more - Nima Heydarian

Victim of Denial of Service Attack?

by Nima on 2 October, 2010

I was.

One of my main websites was hacked two weeks ago. It got attacked by a denial of service attack. Let’s just say it wasn’t good week. The attack took my site down for almost a week. At the end I had to get all sort of new services, move my hosting account, and spend a good amount of money to get it back.

Here is what I did, in case you are under attack right now:

Hosting Provider

Your most powerful weapon is your hosting account provider. They are responsible for stopping the denial of service attacks through their switches, routers, and software that they have installed on their servers.

The attack on my site was pretty sophisticated. It was from all spoofed IP address and they all actually looked legitimate IP addresses. The amount of the attack was huge too. That being said I was not happy when my old hosting provider told me I just have to wait it out and they can’t do anything. My new hosting provide (HostGator) wasn’t successful at stopping the attack right away but they tried and tried and kept me in the loop on what they were doing. At the end they did stop it.

I had two hosting accounts with HostGator before I was already very happy with them, just never got around movingt this other website. Now I have a my third account which is VPS hosting at about $80 a month and I am very happy with it.

Block IP Addresses

When browsing IP addresses of the flood of traffic there were a lot of them from Middle East and South East Asia. So I blocked bunch of countries IP addresses in that area. It helped a little bit. You can’t block too many countries because the IP block list can get fairly long and actually considerably slow down your site.

Use CloudFlare Service

Have your hosting provider set you up with CloudFlare. Your traffic would be re-routed through CloudFlare and only “good” traffic will be able to pass through to your website. This didn’t stop the attack for me but helped a lot. (and they are cheap comparing to the other services online).

User Other (Expensive) DDOS Protection Services

There are other DDOS protection services that can cost you $1000 to $15000 a month. Some of them are VeriSign, Prolexic, and DDOS Arrest,

File a Report with FBI

Do report the incident to FBI Cyber Crime Investigation Unit. Most of the time they won’t reply since your case might be small but at least if it happens again there is a record that you reported it the time before.

Don’t Worry About Ranking

If you have a good website and has great ranking in search engines (like mine), don’t worry about getting your ranking back. Once your site is back online you’ll get your rankings back. My site was actually completely dropped out of search engines during the week of attack and now I have my full ranking back.

Crucial Confrontations Book Review

by Nima on 16 September, 2010

I just finished listening to Crucial Confrontations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. It was a great book and definitely on my re-listen list. Book talks about how to battle tough conversations.

In many ways its the same concepts that “How to win friends and influence people” book talks about. For example how important it is to genuinely listen to the other person and try hard to look at the argument from their point of view. Crucial Confrontations also talks about forgetting the blame game, talking about what you feeling rather than hiding it, and many other great tips. It sounds very basic topics but the authors do a very good job of role playing in the audio and give examples which make the book a lot more valuable.

A good example that comes to my mind is imagine you are in a business argument with a friend of yours and he is taking advantage of your kindness and friendship. Instead of saying “you are always inconsiderate and unreasonable and looking to get more and more from me because I’m nice to you” you can tell them “I feel taken advantage of when you act this way”. People react to the feeling conversation much better than the blame one even though both sentences might imply the same meaning.

This is a great book. Get it and listen to it - twice.

New (Good) Banking Regulation

by Nima on 13 September, 2010

I was reading banking news today and came across this one on BBC. One of the few good regulations coming out of this recession (IMO).

The new rules state that the amount of common equity – the best capital for absorbing losses – that banks have to hold will rise from 2% of their loans and investments to 7%..

The 7% includes a 2.5% “conservation buffer” to protect banks against periods of difficulty or stress.

If banks’ capital ratios fall below 7%, regulators may place restrictions on their ability to pay dividends and bonuses.

Dallas Industrial Automation Group

by Nima on 31 August, 2010

As I said few posts earlier, I just moved to Dallas. After getting settled here I started looking for clubs and networking events to join. I always liked LinkedIn and their professional groups. I had been a member of such groups in other cities and had attended their events. They are usually a great place to meet people and make contacts in your own industry (in this case Industrial Automation).

Well, I didn’t see any such group in Dallas and therefore I started to start one. Here it is: Dallas Industrial Automation Engineers. Hopefully I can start it off by getting some of my co-workers and customers to join the group and expand it from there. The goal is to have one get together every month to discuss current events in the industry and network with each other.

If you would like to join simply go to the group’s page and click join. Also if you have any suggestions for the group I will be very interested to hear it.

PHP Galleria Upgrade Completed

by Nima on 29 August, 2010

I bought PHP Galleria a while ago on Flippa for $1500. I redesigned it, added new features, did some SEO on it, and few usability upgrades. Hopefully it will result in conversion increase.

Following is a complete list of all that was done to the site:

Bought a new OsCommerce template for it and integrated it ($125)
Added new features such as Google Sitemap, easier checkout process, better categorization of products.
Made some on-site search engine optimizations such as more descriptive product descriptions, H1 and H2 tags, title tags, SEO URLs, better linking structure.

My total cost of the site including site purchase, coding work, and template was $1500+$45+125-$400 = $1265. The last $400 was refunded back to me from the original owner because PHP Galleria files had some sort of malware of it when I got it (which I removed and now does not affect the site anymore).

Right now the site makes about $100 to $150 a month. I am hoping to improve it to $250 to $300 a month and then sell the site back on Flippa.