Isn't Alibaba the Chinese version of Amazon? What would they be doing in a conversation between my computer and Stovebolt?
Yes, Alibaba is the Chinese version of Amazon. What they were doing was hammering the server with hundreds of requests per minute. They weren't getting between you and Stovebolt. They were forcing Stovebolt to handle so many requests that it slowed down the response time. Over 700,000 requests in 24 hours. That's almost 30,000 requests per hour, or 486 requests per minute or 8 requests each second. In other words, they tripled our traffic. If we ever got to that level of legitimate traffic, we would need multiple servers configured in a load balancing configuration to handle the requests. If that ever happens, I'll be resigning immediately.
