LiewCF Tech Blog

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In conjunction of Firefly‘s latest announcement of new flight routes to Kota Kinabalu and Kuching, Firefly will be giving out complimentary vouchers to celebrate.

LiewCF.com got 4 pairs of vouchers (that’s 8 round flight tickets) to give out. 2 pairs already gave out in the Twitter giveaway last week (Congratulations to the winners!).

I still have 2 pairs FireFly vouchers left (Kota Kinabalu or Kuching) for FREE giveaway. Read on to learn how to win!

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In conjunction of Firefly’s latest announcement of new flight routes to Kota Kinabalu and Kuching, Firefly will be giving out complimentary vouchers to celebrate.

LiewCF.com got 4 pairs of vouchers (that’s 8 round flight tickets) to give out.

I would like to give higher priority to my Twitter followers. Therefore, 2 pairs of flight tickets will be given to my Twitter followers, exclusively!

The giveaway contest ended yesterday. The winners are picked randomly using Random.org.

The winners!

Here are the winners! Congratulations!

• @vinivedivici won 1 pair of FireFly vouchers to Kuching, Sarawak.
• @ickyuck won 1 pair of Firefly vouchers to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.

The winners will be contacted by Twitter Direct Message and Email.

More to come!

Don’t feel bad if you didn’t win. Thanks for participating. And, I still have 2 more pairs Firefly vouchers to giveaway! Stay tuned!

Follow me on Twitter – @liewcf

Disclosure: I will get a pairs of free flight ticket from FireFly by running this giveaway.

Thanks to FireFly for sponsoring the giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? Contact me.

I told you that my server was under malicious traffic attacks. The server is more stable now but still can see load spikes now and then, even though they didn’t bring down the server.

From the above graph, you can see the server load of past 2 weeks. The highest load was around 140! Imagine that kind of load on a 8 cores sever! Impossible to handle. What we know is that the attacker use cloud computing like Amazon EC2 to launch the attacks.

Is it “Cloud-based DDoS”? The dark side of cloud computing…

So, what can a home-based blogger like me do to fight against the massive attacks? The software based protection such as firewall, (D)Dos-Deflate, etc have been installed. They helped a bit but not the solution.

I’ll need a fully managed web hosting with high security and DDoS protection at affordable (not “cheap”, I understand the setup is expensive) price tag…

Am I asking too much?
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In the past week, my server was down couple times due to massive attacks from unknown sources targeting liewcf.com (this blog).

The malicious traffic caused high server load (load spikes) and brought down the server. Restarted web services didn’t help.

That was very frustrating. Website uptime is essential for a full-time blogger, just like how important is the car for a taxi driver.

Website down = No traffic = No $$$

I spent hours and hours sitting in front computer to monitor the server load. Mood went down with the server…

Fighting attackers!

Here I have to praise the support of my hosting provider — Liquidweb.

In order to monitor my server for load spikes that happen randomly, server admins are assigned for 24/7 close monitoring. *thumbs up*

In the end, the server admin blacklisted the IP addresses to return the server to normal stage.

So far, the server performance is good now. There are still some load spikes now and then, but eventually they go down before bringing down the server again.
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