Firstly, apologies for the inconvenience that brought you here. We made this page available to explain to our users why, on occasion, templates from a certain supplier do not show on Templates.net pages.

Because the major template suppliers add to their catalogs daily, and exclusive purchases remove templates from their catalogs on a minute-by-minute basis, we do not host the template previews ourselves. The catalog databases are maintained by the template suppliers and our pages source the preview images from their servers.

This means that if the template supplier's site is down for any reason, our pages just show white space or a page not found type message where the templates should be.

Usually such problems are trivial and short-lived - due to a brief DNS hiccup at your ISP, a necessary server restart at the template supplier, or somesuch mundane reason - and the page will be back online within seconds, or minutes at most. You may wish to see if the page is back now! Unless you arrived at this page from a search engine, just press your browser Back button and then press Ctrl-F5 to do a hard refresh.

The page has been blank for hours! What's going on?

That is probably a DDoS - a distributed denial of service attack. In recent months, some of the large template companies have been victims of attacks in which huge amounts of data are requested from their servers every second.

In a comparatively small attack of this type, the suppliers' servers will be unable to handle all the requests on them in real time, and will be very slow. This will also slow down our pages that display template previews.

Larger scale attacks bring servers offline altogether. Design Galaxy, Design Load and Boxed Art have all been hit heavily by attacks in recent months. Template Monster has also been badly affected, although not recently.

We have no information about the motives or identities of the originators of these attacks. Even if we did it we couldn't post it. It would be in the hands of the FBI.

Attacks can last hours or days. Three days is not uncommon. Beyond that is very unusual, but in June 2004, Design Galaxy and Design Load (which are owned by the same company) were each offline, more-or-less constantly, for about three weeks due to a series of particularly vicious DDoS attacks.

It's still down. What can I do?

Sorry, there's not much you can do except wait. We would like to suggest that you wait however long it takes - until the attack is over, and that you do not change your buying intentions because of the DDoS attacks. We would like to take such a purist line, because any other approach is in some sense to yield to what the attackers may want.

But in the real world, such ideals are seldom possible. You may need to look elsewhere if you're running against a deadline and there's no end in sight. This is a major frustration for the design community, of that there is no doubt.

What does Templates.net do in these situations?

There's nothing much we can do either. We don't take the affected pages offline, because that would just mean that when the attacks stop, but before we can get the pages back up, we would be further damaging the supplier's business.

So, as a result, our beautiful (!) pages get vandalized by ugly white space and our valued customers suffer significant inconvenience. Please feel free to contact us in case we do have any specific information that might help you.



Last modified: Monday, 27-Sep-2004 12:37:43 EDT. Print this page.