Behind the Curtain

I’ve painstakingly moved all of my web, streaming, and e-mail to another server.  I say painstakingly because it was actually two separate moves, but that’s another story.   The moves have made me take a closer look at the performance of the server and the resources that my sites use (seven, plus several others I host for other people).

It seems a shame to me that 98% of the traffic (just a guesstimate) in and out of the server is all hacker or spam related.   I’m basically paying for memory, disk, CPU and data transfer to support that.  If I only paid for resources for legitimate use, the illegitimate stuff would use it all up, not leaving anything left over.

The number one processor hog is the firewall system to protect the server from break-in attempts.  The number 3 spot goes to the spam detection system.

It almost seems like there are more cyber criminals than real-life criminals.  But I think its a distorted way of looking it at.  A single cyber criminal can make a virus that infects people’s computers so that he/she gains control of an army of computers. This army is then used to scour servers like mine for vulnerabilities or to send spam.  According to my server logs, most of the infected computers are outside of the US.  Just this morning I saw spam attempts from computers in Mexico and Brazil.

So my server spends most of it’s resources protecting itself from robot computers.

In spite of all that, it appears everything is running smoothly.  I’ve also added the link to the sidebar for my streaming radio program, which will resume in a week or two.  Hopefully that will run smoother as well.

Edited to add:  I will try streaming a live Road Trip show as a test, this evening at the usual time.