This post is intended to warn people who do what I used to do about what drove me out of this business, in hopes it will not happen to you. Many of you may have known me when I was fully active, making sites, getting to the first page and profiting from AdSense, and then all of a sudden I stopped! Alright, let's get straight to the point. Many of you here do what I did to make money, step by step. 1.- Make site. 2.- Optimize site, pay for links, wait on results. 3.- Gain first page on Google. 4.- Make profits, anywhere from $1/day to $50/day per site. So I had many sites, but i never thought someone could do this: 1.- Realize your site in Google positions 1-3 is making a lot of money (for them, in some countries $10/day is awesome). 2.- Realize they will never get above you in SERPs without a huge amount of money and effort, but also realize that there is an easier way to get rid of you. 3.- Start various attacks, in particular Denial of Service attacks. As many of you should know, site downtime loses your SERP. If the DoS attacks are not done continuously, but only sometimes, your site will be down in rare occasions. However, this is enough for Google to drive your site down the rankings, while you are not aware of it. I am speaking from experience and you can choose to believe me or not, but please do not start an argument about this. I don't like arguing! I didn't realize what was happening until it was too late. I always dismissed weird server slow downs as non-important, and at the end payed the most expensive price for it, not only losing the site being attacked but also all other projects that were running on the same server. This is easy to prevent. (for small sites, and small attacks) Very easy, in fact. Don't be cheap. Pay a proper host which takes care of security for you. Either that, or make sure you know how to take proper measures to guard yourself against these kind of attacks. Also if you notice your server being slow for no apparent reason, don't dismiss it as I did, but try and make sure it is legitimate traffic, if it is not, then you might be the target of someone trying to sabotage you. Why should i worry, i don't make that much anyway... meh! Well that's what i thought, but as you will find out, some people will do anything to be in your position making the worthless $100-$300 a month you make. Anything above that? Even better! As if so many SEOs are skilled enough to DoS! Hah! Quoted from PCWorld "The tool to launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, which has crippled large retail and news Web sites this week, is one of the simplest, most common, and most vindictive applications in an illicit hacker's toolbox." Anyway, I hope this gets some of you thinking about security more, all best in your endeavors! -David Tenemaza
Hmm, thanks for posting that - it may not affect me that much as I don't create that many websites but it's good to know.
you know how much a well-made DDOS costs on a black market? it's much-much costly then SEO prices. 150-200$ per day for a medium web-site to go offline..
Yep, this is not about medium web-sites which are properly hosted. This is about small sites which people think won't be affected, small sites hosted on cheap hosts in order to save some money. You don't need a well-made paid for DDOS to bring down an unprotected site in a cheap host. Many people rent unprotected non-managed servers with CPanel, and know little or nothing about server security and will quickly dismiss any slow downs or crashes as a minor detail, you know "oh well it happens". By the way, this is not about "buying" or not buying links, everybody rents links on sites, and if you do it right there is no way to know its actually paid for if you know where to place them. Anyway.
Just get the article to the front page of Digg, thats a free DoS attack right there. A good article. Interesting read.
Regardless of security or a firewall if someone wants to do a DDoS (Not DoS) they can take down a server, they can simple attack backend servers connecting you to the internet.
Distributed Denial of Service costs more , where as a normal DoS can be done by anyone. Your view isn't right anyway, it is easier to take down a site which is on a host that doesn't care, or a small host, whereas it is to take down a site which is hosted with a company that takes care of security for you, or a big host.