Sacred Heart Website Problems

If you have had difficulty accessing Sacred Heart’s Website, there is a reason. Rackspace, the computer server hosting company that eCatholic uses to host our website, that a DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service attack) was targeted specifically at them  (or their of their clients' websites; ie: a church).
 
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack where the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
 
In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single source.
 
A DoS or DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door or gate to a shop or business, and not letting legitimate parties enter into the shop or business, disrupting normal operations. Thursday, their primary IP (address on the Internet – similar to the address on your house) had to be taken down (hidden) in order to eliminate the DDoS attack. 

eCatholic has been exploring options with Rackspace, but unfortunately, the standard protocol for DDoS attacks is to ride them out. This typically means leaving the IP address (the way to find the Church’s website) offline for at least 24 hours, which means that all of our sites will likely be down until at least late Friday night. 

They apologise for the trouble that this attack is causing you and they will continue to remain diligent in working with Rackspace to explore options to try and alleviate the attack sooner so that we can restore all websites. Thanks for your prayers and patience as they, and us, ride out this unfortunate attack. 

You can learn more about DDoS attacks here:  http://ecatholic.us/ddos