I do realise that that’s a technical term, that you may not be familiar with. I apologise.

However, it’s terrible. We’ve been having problems with one of the instances (virtual machines) that we’re running inside Azure. As soon it had the slightest bit of load on it, it would suddenly think that its hard drive was faulty, and lock up.  This isn’t what I expect from a cloud provider that’s meant to care deeply about reliability and redunancy.

Then I remembered, this is Microsoft. If there’s one company that doesn’t care about reliability, it’s Microsoft. How foolish of me.

So. Now we’re hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (aka, EC²). Amazon know how to make a service reliable, and so far have done well.  So everything’s now here. Lets see how this goes!

Well, now that we seem to have stabilized (fingers crossed), here’s some news on what’s happening.  YES, I am thinking about firing up a RolePlay server. There’s been a discussion about it in the forums, and I think it should be able to go ahead.  We’re still thinking about what plugins to use, and if you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it in the forum.

Also, apparently I’m getting interviewed by the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin tomorrow. About Minecraft. Coz it’s awesome. Or something.

So WordPress is now running fully from Azure, and you’ll notice that the website is nice and fast again.  Things still to do (I’ll update them as they’re done)

• Minecraft (Done)
• Mumble (Done)
• WordPress (Done – yay)
• Forums (Done)
• Modreq Tracker (done)
• Wiki (done)
• Whatever else I’ve forgotten…

Edit 2: Did you see that? That was Azure crashing. I’m feeling somewhat less happy about it now. But maybe it was just a temporary glitch…

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.

But as we had a bit of preparation time, we’re now able to fend off these attacks, and hopefully no-one should even notice them.

We’ve moved everything to Microsoft’s Azure hosting platform, in Singapore. This does mean that it’s now stupidly expensive to host MCAU again, but, we’re DDOS proof.

More information to come. And thanks for your support. I love you guys 8)