It's interesting that they're basically saying Rackspace's network couldn't hold up and doesn't have an effective solution for DDOS victims on their network.

Gige's DDOS protection is basically a hosted redirect and filtering system that "leverage[s] the cost of DDoS mitigation amongst a large group of businesses, giving you access to the infrastructure that would normally be out of reach financially." http://www.gigenet.com/ddos-protection.html

But if Posterous is hosted on the Rackspace cloud, why isn't there a mechanism to do this through their existing host? After all, Rackspace has an equivalent service (maybe rebranded?) that would seem to offer protection without needing to go to a 3rd party vendor. http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/services/security/d...

So it's interesting that Posterous needed to go around Rackspace to get a solution.

It's tough -- if someone is hitting you at > 1gbps, that exceeds a gigabit ethernet port -- typically on shared services you only pay for that much. Any more than that and it affects all the other customers on the shared network. So yes, Rackspace has the bandwidth for it, but at the same time if you were Rackspace, would you let our DDoS take down the other hosts in the datacenter?

Gigenet / Black Lotus / Prolexic comes in and says -- we have excess bandwidth, we'll take care of it. Then they proxy clean traffic to you. Unfortunately as we are learning, it's also very expensive.