On the 11th of April 2017 GhanaWeb (ghanaweb.com) was temporarily shut-down by a DDOS-attack of 30 GBPS. We suspect that the attack was a response to our publications about illegal mining in Ghana.
Technically we were capable to mitigate this severe attack. We could have been back online in a matter of 2-3 hours.
Unfortunately our webhosting company pair Networks refused to give us any technical assistance in this emergency.
Instead pair Networks abruptly stopped hosting our main domain www.ghanaweb.com. Effectively this unexpected action by pair Networks shut us down completely.
The general public should be aware that the attackers did not shut us down. It was the webhosting provider, pair Networks, who shutted down the most important website of the Republic of Ghana.
GhanaWeb did not violate any terms of the contract. There were no legal reason what-so-ever for their decision.
The reason was fear:
the bottom line here is that the
attacker appears to know the underlying host, pair.com, and it isn't out of
the realm of possibility that the attacker simply keeps picking a pair
Networks based IP address or worse yet, www.pair.com itself. These are the
reasons that we are unable to provide further service for ghanaweb.com or
any of its sub-domains.
Because of this unexpected and ill-motivated decision by pair.com we have been forced into an unplanned migration to an alternative webhosting provider. Step by step we have been able to put ghanaweb.com back online in the past week. Unfortunately the downtime has been massive.
Our priority is to restore services back to normal but we are seriously considering legal actions against pair Networks.
To our 3 million monthly visitors affected by this incident we apologize. We are working around the clock to restore the issues.
Technically we were prepared and capable to withstand the Chinese attackers. We simply could not foresee that pair Networks - our 'loyal' hosting provider since 1998 - could disappoint us like this.
Sincerely,
Management
