Understanding DDoS Protection and Mitigation

What a DDoS Attack Actually Is

A distributed denial of service attack, commonly called DDoS, floods a website or server with an overwhelming volume of traffic from many sources simultaneously, aiming to exhaust its resources and make it unavailable to legitimate visitors. Unlike a single source attack, the distributed nature makes DDoS traffic harder to block by simply denying one source, since the traffic originates from many different locations at once.

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Why Businesses Get Targeted

DDoS attacks are launched for various reasons, including competitive sabotage, extortion attempts demanding payment to stop an ongoing attack, activism directed at a specific business or cause, or simply as a distraction tactic while a separate attack is attempted elsewhere against the same target. Any business with an online presence is a potential target, regardless of size or industry.

How DDoS Protection Works

DDoS protection systems continuously monitor incoming traffic patterns, identifying and filtering out malicious traffic before it reaches your actual server, while allowing legitimate visitor traffic through largely unaffected. This filtering typically happens at a network level positioned in front of your infrastructure, absorbing and analyzing traffic before it ever reaches the server itself.

Signs You May Be Experiencing a DDoS Attack

A sudden, dramatic spike in traffic that does not correspond to any marketing activity or expected event, your website or application becoming slow or entirely unresponsive without an obvious cause, and unusual traffic patterns such as requests concentrated on a single page or resource are all potential indicators worth investigating.

What to Do If You Suspect an Attack

Contact our support team immediately if you suspect you are experiencing a DDoS attack, since mitigation is most effective when addressed quickly. Avoid making unrelated changes to your infrastructure during a suspected attack, since this can complicate diagnosing and addressing the actual issue.

Protection Included With Your Hosting

Our infrastructure includes DDoS protection as part of our broader network architecture, designed to absorb and filter attack traffic before it affects your specific hosting environment. The specific level of protection can vary by hosting tier, and enterprise customers with particularly high risk profiles may benefit from discussing additional dedicated protection measures with our team.

Reducing Your Overall Risk

While DDoS protection at the infrastructure level handles the bulk of this risk, keeping your own applications and plugins updated, since some attacks specifically exploit known application vulnerabilities alongside pure traffic flooding, adds an additional layer of resilience beyond network level protection alone.