The Recent Mysterious Behavior At HairBoutique.com

Hi Karen,

I'm so sorry you'e endured so much BS with the hackers, spammers and trolls lately. The others here have worded their appreciations better than I can, all I can do is say I agree with them and very much appreciate your efforts to keep this place fun to visit and discuss the topics at hand.

Hi Uzma & Lyris,

You guys make all the craziness worth every crazy thing that happens. :-) And of course all the other wonderful HairTalk posters and members and moderators (who are all doing awesome jobs).

To Uzma,

The virus was a SequelServer virus that literally took out the majority of the servers at our ISP in Atlanta. Luckily we had applied patches to our Dallas servers and knock on wood, avoided the virus here. However, as of a few hours ago when I checked, the Atlanta ISP was still down. So I am just happy that we got everything set up at the new location in Texas on Friday.

Thank you so much for your concern. I am sure that the ISP will be eventually able to figure out where it all started but it is a nasty one.

Viruses are being launched in unbelievable record numbers. It is actually pretty sad.

And yes, I am having a good weekend. I actually took a few hours yesterday to hang out and read a "fun" book. I am having dinner tonight with my fav nephew and niece and so all is good in Karenland. :-)

Lyris,

You are so kind. Thank you for your good words about HB.com. I was very upset when it happened because it seemed like such a waste but it actually opened a new avenue for us so I am grateful for that.

I hope you are having a wonderful weekend as well.

Best wishes,
Karen

What a nightmare!!

Hope you are O.K Karen.

Did they find out who was responsible for the virus attack? What a nasty thing to do.
Well, "Judgement is Mine, sayeth the Lord - I will repay...".
I wish those who intended and caused harm to your business and this community their just deserts.

Thanks for being strong in the face of adversity, Karen. And all's well, as you say.

Thanks for sharing and knowing that we are all right with you.

Grizzly Bear Hugs!!!

Uzma

Hi all,

I know that Dave was having some problems with the messageboards a few days ago and a few people have emailed to ask what was happening. I suspect many of you may have experienced some oddities during Wednesday, Thursday or Friday.

First let me apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused any of you. I thought I would share just a few of the behind the scene events since Wednesday night at 4:00 pm that happened here at HB.com. It is a little off topic but it does explain why some of you might not have been able to respond to messages at HairTalk.

The HairBoutique.com site has grown so huge in size that it runs on a series of 4 different dedicated servers. One dedicated server for HairTalk alone, one for the HairBoutique.com Marketplace, one for the HB hair photo Galleries and one separate server just for the HB.com general site. We host all of our different HB sites here in Dallas. However, we had only a small percentage of the main HB.com site here in Dallas because our traffic has been surging to close to 1 million hits per day. To manage the HB.com main site we have had an overflow ISP provider in Atlanta for the past several years that allowed us to expand and contract our bandwidth right along with the HB traffic surges.

On Wednesday at 4:00 pm the Atlanta ISP that had the hosting responsibility for the majority of the HB.com main site crashed and burned due to a huge virus attack at their facility that took out the majority of their entire facility. We called the ISP as soon as HB.com started having problems. The ISP promised the HB site would be back up in about 1 hour (Wednesday by midnight at the latest). Luckily this virus attack did not impact our Dallas based HB servers w/ HairTalk or the Marketplace or Gallery. However, it did take out the HB.com Home site.

By Thursday we realized that the ISP was not being straight w/ us and they were not going to be restoring HB.com anytime soon. So we started working on transferring a percentage of the HB.com Home site back to Dallas. That was done by Thursday evening. However, we were still running in a somewhat reduced mode. Which explains why some of you were not able to post to the HairTalk threads.

By Friday we totally gave up on the ISP in Atlanta (they were still down close to 48 later) and transferred all the HB.com Home site files to a major carrier here in Texas. By 5:00 the HB.com main site was back up at 100% capacity and co-located in the carrier's location.

The bad news is that we lost about 24 hours of HB.com home page down time and reduced access. The good news is that we now have a secondary site here in Texas that we have 100% control of and it has 5x the capacity that the Atlanta site did. We also have the option to instantly expand during major traffic surges like we did with the previous ISP although we are starting out with a lot more bandwidth and security.

As the saying goes....when one door closes, another opens. I have to say that it was extremely stressful during the outage and not helped by the fact that the Atlanta ISP kept saying "you will be back up in 1 hour". In reality the ISP did not bring the HB.com site back up until approximately 11:30 today (Saturday). So that "one hour" promise actually took closer to 65 hours.

I know how much I hate it when people don't give the the straight scoop. If the ISP had told me that the attack was deadly and we would be down for days rather than hours, I could/would have reacted much quicker to going with a new host. So I felt that you all were owed the scoop on what was happening here at HB.com.

Anyway, alls well that ends well and I want to thank all of your for your patience and loyalty to HairBoutique.com and HairTalk. This most recent virus attack also illuminates why I have zero tolerance for any activitiy for hackers, trolls, spammers or virus spawners. It is beyond my comprehension why people would enjoy the malicious destruction or harrassment that they cause to a lot of innocent people that are just trying to go about their own business.

Best wishes,
Karen