SensoryMetrics

Sometimes as a new website owner you want to see how much more traffic your site can handle. Instead of waiting until you really do get hit with a ton of traffic, why not fake it and see what happens? Please keep in mind that the traffic will be completely useless as no real eyes will be looking at your site! It’s just a bunch of machines scattered around the internet that will ping your site. If you buy enough of it, it could actually take down your site (not good).

We’re not going to mention the name of the service we bought $10 of useless hits to our site with, but needless to say we could tell right away that the traffic was bogus. No one clicked very much which is a dead give away because our regular visitors click like mad, usually 6 or more page hits.

Be careful as some of these ‘more traffic’ sites advertise the promise of real traffic by real people but actually rip you off! We’re also pretty sure that our host provider identified the traffic as fake and kept it from attacking our server. Thank you Bluehost for keeping SM alive and kicking! Technically, this was not a DoS attack as it did not do really nasty things like try to hang connections or flood the site with way too many hits. It was more like a gentle ping shower with a couple of spikes (you think they’d have at least distributed the fake hits more evenly).

If you’d like to know how to fight distributed denial of service attacks, read more here at the Sans Institute. If you want to know still more then also check out Backtracking Spoofed Packets.

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