They're refusing to hand over data to the FBI about visitors to a Trump-protest site, so if this is more than a co-incidence, then we're possibly looking at internet-savvy "Pro-Trump" folks. Since we know 4chan was a huge congregation point, I'd wager they're just a bunch of folks using LOIC to attack DH, or some DNS amplification attack.
Edit: Interestingly enough, this is going on even though the DOJ amended their request to be more focused (they claimed to not understand exactly what they were requesting, which is just as scary). So, DH will probably comply now, but the attack rages on. http://fortune.com/2017/08/23/doj-dreamhost-anti-trump/
The title to that article is misleading. They didn't drop the request, they changed it to limit the scope. If you read the changes, they are no longer requests HTTP request and response logs, but rather published content on the site and any transactions.
They dropped the request for the IP addresses, but actually broadened what they were looking for. National Law Journal had one of the better articles on this at
... we're possibly looking at internet-savvy "Pro-Trump" folks
After all, they are free people like artists. If artists get up in the morning feeling good, all they do all day is paint. The same goes for internet-savvy Pro-Trump folks.
> I am but a robot. My purpose is to syndicate the contents of http://dreamhoststatus.com . I can feel neither love, nor pain. Tweet @dreamhostcare for support!
Just have to say, dreamhost has had great uptime for such a cheap package, given the amount of features they provide.
Given this is not at all a result of their own error, I think they're doing a great job with reliability. By comparison (and it's not much of a comparison) godaddy shared hosting goes down WEEKLY for spans of 5-10 minutes, and it's more expensive and has way fewer features.
Well this finally gave me the bump to move my DNS away from Dreamhost, which I have been meaning to do for literally years, now to sit and wait for the new name servers to propagate.
Larger DNS providers are harder to DDoS and also tend to have more DDoS mitigation in place. This is not to say that it can never happen, but it's substantially less likely.
I dont think DH is really all that small. Comlared to aws and stuff maybe but I think they have pretty significant infrastructure.
What Dns providers are you thinking of? My guess would be something like cloudflare would be a good choice. Though Ive never looked into it tbh, I run my own dns.
I can highly recommend keeping your DNS stuff separate from hosting. For 'critical' stuff I've been quite happy to use DNSimple for that, and regular mom-and-pop LAMP hosting for the actual site.
In some cases I pipe it through Digital Ocean, because it's nice to have everything in one place, but I've wondered if that might have some performance impact. Can anyone confirm/deny this? So, domain registrar -> Digital Ocean -> hosting.
Update: There are reports that the DDOS is in reaction to DreamHost hosting PunishedStormer, the rebranded DailyStormer site.
https://twitter.com/OpStandUpToCFAA/status/90077016627919667...
And the tail end of https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/daily-stormer-punished-storm...