At the very beginning of Russia’s war with Ukraine, we officially and publicly condemned this invasion of Ukraine by Russian armed forces. Instead of a video from our server room, we put a big flying Ukrainian flag on our website. This flag was also put on our Russian website wedos.ru. We have issued statements in Ukrainian colours on various subpages, we have prepared an article Ongoing cyber war may affect you too, get ready for it! and sent it to all our customers by email. We couldn’t stand by and each of us wanted to do something. At least help in some way and show your disapproval.
WEDOS Internet, a.s. statement on the current geopolitical situation
We have always fought for freedoms and for the right things. We’ve always fought for our customers and we’ve always fought against shutting down any services. We fought for our customers and fought for them. We’ve only had problems with it, but in certain situations principles are more important than profits or the path of least resistance.
And that’s why we have to speak up now.
We are a private company and we feel that it is necessary to take a clear stand on current events. We understand that some of our customers may not like what we say and we respect that, but our customers also need to understand and respect that we can speak up and express our opinions. It’s about our future. This is about the future of all of us.
Yes, we may lose some customers in the Czech Republic because several of them wrote to us telling us not to meddle in politics. We may lose customers from Russia. But what’s that against the lives lost…
The Ukrainian flag on the protection page may have solved it
WEDOS Global Protection protects websites with a redirect page or captcha. We have placed the Ukrainian flag there as well as in other places as part of our expression of support for Ukraine. It looks like this:
Since one of the first ideas to help Ukraine was to offer help to Ukrainians in the form of free web hosting and protection, placing a sign “We stand with Ukraine” was a matter of course. By the way, we have already written officially to the Ukrainian Embassy about this aid.
So we offer all people from Ukraine and Ukrainian companies our hosting services, including web hosting protection, free of charge for the duration of the conflict.
After we put up a website supporting Ukraine, there were web DDoS attacks. We hid dozens of sites behind this page, and as you can guess, many of those hidden sites didn’t like it very much.
About three customers were bothered by the Ukraine promotion, others were bothered by the drop in traffic because their “visitors” didn’t pass the cookie check protection or were unable to fill in the captcha correctly. But they don’t lose real visitors, but mostly bots and wrong traffic (for example, unintentional clicks on links, especially on mobile, when the visitor quickly backs away or closes the page).
Unfortunately, we don’t have another site. For now, WEDOS Global Protection can’t even do that yet. Currently we do not have the possibility to set individual solutions there.
Without this protection, and with so many attacks, many sites will not only not make it, but will overload our infrastructure.
Therefore, we have decided that our customers who do not take it to heart that their site is protected by this site will be moved to a special dedicated physical server that is outside of the infrastructure that could affect other customers, and their protection will be disabled (except for the SYN proxy).
Of course, we cannot operate in this way for the long term, so we have no choice but to terminate the contract and give these customers 30 days to leave for a competitor according to the terms of the contract.
If a site gets several thousand requests per second and then gets attacked at several tens of Gbps, or if they send 13 million SYN packets per second, you have no choice but to filter and block it, or pray that other customers don’t experience a service outage. Fortunately, we have functional protection and if someone doesn’t like it, we have no choice but to part ways.
If a customer doesn’t understand this, it’s pointless for us to continue to worry together and we wish them good luck with the competition.
The world has changed and action is needed
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world has changed forever from one day to the next. Switzerland, as a symbol of neutrality, imposed financial sanctions after 207 years, pacifist Germany, which never wanted to enter the war in any way, sends weapons, untouchable tax haven Monaco freezes assets.
The world is changing and we must respond to it.
We cannot remain neutral in this new world. It is not our duty to remain neutral. We are a private entity and so we stood up for the right thing. We must fight for freedom as hard as we can. We want to and will help Ukraine. And if someone condemns us or leaves us because of that, there is nothing to be done.