How DDoS Protection Work?

When you hear complaints that your end users are not being able to access your site you should suspect a DDoS attack. To protect your site from DDoS attacks, it is important to understand how the attack happens and how the protection can work to prevent it. The DDoS attacks are essentially a kind of cyber attack which is inflicted on a site where the servers get "fake" traffic. The servers are flooded with innumerable requests and queries as a result of which they become unresponsive and sluggish. The fake traffic ensures that the legitimate traffic gets blocked from the site. When you cannot control such cyber attacks, the site may become unavailable and the real traffic to it will dramatically decrease.

How DDoS Protection Works:

There are many web hosts which offer DDoS protection as part of their hosting solutions. The main solution for protecting your site against such attacks is by monitoring the site traffic. So, you can make use of advanced algorithms and software to see if the traffic that is coming into your website is indeed legitimate or not. The illegitimate traffic will automatically be refused access while the legitimate traffic moves as expected. The DDoS protection measures can safeguard your site up to a certain extent and these are designed to prevent attacks of a certain size. So, the standard measures will be able to counter attacks which range from 5-10 gigabytes a second. You will need much stronger measures for larger attacks which involve 100 gigabytes per second.

Before you sign up for DDoS protection from any provider, you should check whether your web host will give it. Some web hosts have this as part of their dedicated hosting packages. Depending on the kind of traffic you get and the size of the attacks, your protection measures are going to vary. Not all protection plans will be enough for every business. You can consider the average volume of traffic and then discuss with the host to find out which kind of protection would be best suited for your website. Regardless of the degree of protection you sign up for, the truth is that all site administrators must consider this for their site security. Armed with DDoS protection, you can steer clear of frequent down times. Your reputation will also be protected in the process. The best DDoS protection plans can handle any form of attack, no matter what its size is. While the attacks are usually very large in size, the more successful ones are actually those which have a smaller magnitude. These may not really block your website; they will successfully slow down the server so that pages take a very long time to load.

Another useful thing to remember when you consider DDoS protection is that while you may feel your site is not a target for such attacks; the truth is these attacks can target any site. Most often they target online gaming servers and credit union websites. It is also true that while hackers work hard to find new ways to target your site, protectors work harder to improve their defenses. So, whether you experience a zero-day attack or resource depletion attack or volumetric attack, you should deploy DDoS protection to save your website. It will offer peace of mind in times when cyber threats are a huge danger and the Internet is uncertain. Many people fail to understand the implications of such an attack. Once it happens and visitors are aware of it, they would be hesitant to come back to your site.

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