We’re now fully hosted by Microsoft’s Azure platform. This is.. stupendously expensive, but having massive pipes coming into the machine seems to be the only way to avoid these flooders.

So, we’re now in Singapore, which is pretty much indistinguishable from Australia’s pings, but they have massive, unfloodable, pipes.

So, go wild, have fun! I still have to move a chunk of stuff around inside Azure (we were originally in the US), but most people shouldn’t notice it. There’ll be some brief website outages, but that should be it.

We’ve also done some stuff to avoid other attacks to our server, like limiting connection attempts. This may effect you If your connection is unstable, and you try to connect to us more than 4 times in 60 seconds. Our firewall monitors that, and MCAU will vanish from the internet (as far as you’re concerned) for another 60 seconds. If you keep trying, it’ll keep ignoring you. You have to leave it alone for a total of 60 seconds before it’ll start letting you connect again.

This is, still, somewhat exploitable, but we’re trying hard to balance between usability and disappointing script kiddies with a botnet.

There are also other things under the hood that you guys don’t need to care about (such as adding extra caching and DDOS protection in front of all our services), and also subscribing to a couple of Botnet IP lists, so those machines are blocked before they can even connect to our machine.

We’ve done all we can on our limited budget. And to think, this is just ‘a hobby’ for us. Phew!

Edit: I’ll be re-opening D’s next week. If you wish to continue being a donator, you can resubscribe then.