Hello. I have several sites hosted with neureal, and they have just had a Denial of Service attack and my sites have been down for 24 hours, possibly for another 24 hours which costs me over $1000.

Am now looking for a new host, but wanted to ask if co-location would prevent these sorts of problems? What do you have to look for to make sure the site doesn't go down?

Thanks

Colocation will not prevent downtime due to DOS attack. Usually DOS attack will affect a lot if not all servers in the data center. What makes a difference, though, is how good the network engineer in the datacenter to detect, block and/or prevent such attack.

Thanks. So, how do you select such a host? What do you think you need to look for?

24 hours downtime due to a DoS (not DOS) attack wouldn't be a reason I would swap hosts. There are no full proof options... The safest option would be to have a backup in a different datacenter I guess. I don't know much about doing something like that but I bet it would cost more to do that than to just suck up the down time your having.

find any big hosting provider
that does not host any irc related programs

I haven't had a DoS in over 3 years..

and I have thousands of clients..