Didn't imagine the downtime was a DDoS collateral though.
Ironically, if the DDoS had been directed straight at us, we probably would have fared better. We have the Cloudflare protection service on our system, which helps to block things before they get to rackspace. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it does provide something of a firewall. But instead someone attacked another site in the same location as ours, and somehow flooded that general network, completely circumventing cloudflare as far as we were concerned.
It's like having a guard dog at the front door, in our case, and someone walks in through the back door. Sure they still can probably get past the guard dog if they are determined enough, but in this specific instance the dog never even saw them or had a chance to react. As far as it knew, the house was fine since nobody bad was coming in the front yard.
