Regular readers of this blog may be wondering why there’s been so few new posts in the past several months…
The reasons for our tardiness are two-fold: First of all I’ve been relocating my home and business to Aston Bay in the Eastern Cape. Secondly – blame the latest versions of WordPress, and above all the new text editor (TinyMCE 4.*).
Internet access data shaping, also known as “packet shaping” and “traffic shaping” is the method used by some Internet Service Providers providers to limit certain types of internet data traffic. The internet provider may impose data shaping for several reasons, the most common being insufficient network capacity; nearly always a result of the “profit motive” – ISPs oversell capacity and try to load as many paying customers on to a network as possible, to grab extra profit from the limited resources.
Internet service providers will seldom admit their sole reason for data shaping is profit, they will usually tell clients they regulate network data transfer rates to assure a certain level of performance or quality of service (QoS) for all clients. Whether or not their data shaping adversely affects these same clients is of little consequence except in a highly competitive market.
GoDaddy Hosting’s entire server network was taken down Monday Sept 10, 2012 by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack by a hacker. Most, if not all, websites hosted by GoDaddy were down for several hours. E-mail and telephone services were also affected
Exactly how many sites were affected. GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest hosting providers and domain registrar with more than 5 million websites affected by the outage, and peak downtime estimates suggest as many as 48 million websites were affected by the attack
Mail Online (dailymail.co.uk) reports:
- Web hosting giant hacked and all of the websites run through GoDaddy were shut down temporarily as a result of Monday’s attack
- Service was eventually restored for the bulk of customers by 5:43pm (GMT)
GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said:
That’s my lot these past three weeks; the net has been bad. Latency rate high, intermittent connections, slow, frustrating. And of course work is piling up. These past weeks have been a battle – even writing a post for this blog has been a trial of persistence. Even the WordPress auto-save function has been affected.
Maybe it’s over; Yesterday was not to bad, today I haven’t been disconnected once, yet!
It’s not only me – South African internet has been bad everywhere. And of course the people managing the service causing the bottleneck are saying nothing. What I have been able to deduce using the internet tools available, is the Telkom ADSL network has been the cause. At some point 99% of all local internet traffic is carried by Telkom for part of the route. The ADSL routers have been dropping up to 100% of data packets, a fact I mentioned a week ago in an article on graphicline.co.za (Telkom Internet Routing Causing Problems).
