What is DDoS Attack and how to protect your Dedicated Server or VPS

Contents

1 What are DDoS attacks?
2 How do DDoS attacks work
3 How harmful are DDoS attacks?
4 How to protect your server from a DDoS attack?
5 In conclusion
- 5.1 Learn more

Today a well-made and well-working website plays an essential role for a vast majority of businesses. However, some people may not like it when your business goes well and they might wish to create problems for you for this or that reason. One of the ways to harm your online business is the use of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which are capable of drastically reducing the performance of your website and even making it crash. What are these attacks, how do they harm your website, and, last but not least, how you can save your website from accidents of this kind – that’s what we are going to discuss in today’s article.

What are DDoS attacks?

DDoS

Imagine you have a store – people come to your shop, buy something and go away. Everything goes well, but one fine day a crowd of odd customers comes to your shop, creating a huge queue and not buying anything. They just stand and occupy the place that must be occupied by normal customers – just like an army of zombies. That’s how DDoS attacks work. And to protect your server from such, you have to be able to distinguish customers from these “zombies” to chase the latter away once they appear. But we’ll talk about the DDoS-preventive measures later. Now, let’s see what are DDoS attacks from the technical point of view.

How do DDoS attacks work

Your website and the internet as a whole work due to dozens of complex interactions that are performed through the network – requests, and answers to these requests on different levels. DDoS attacks are exploiting these mechanisms to create spoofed traffic that will overload your system and push away the visitors to your website.

DDoS attacks come from Denial of Service attacks, that used to be performed with the help of one or two devices sending excessive requests to a particular service. With time they have become inefficient, as the servers became more and more powerful, but they give way to a more advanced type of attack – Distributed Denial of Service attacks. In this case, the hackers use not a single PC or laptop, but a global network of devices contaminated with malware that turns them into bots – a botnet – that massively perform DoS attacks against one particular website.

How harmful are DDoS attacks?

DDoS attacks are aimed at decreasing the performance of your website and its accessibility to the customers, eventually causing downtimes. In this way, your site’s visitors can be blocked from using your service at the most inconvenient moment. This can be unpleasant for them, so they can go search for a website of one of your competitors or just leave disappointed. This will also sink your SEO rankings, which is bad in the long-term perspective. For this reason, having a strong and reliable ddos security system installed is extremely important.

The cybercriminals may DDoS your website, trying to blackmail you to get a ransom, or they can do it because they don’t like you, don’t share your views, or just have fun having nothing else to do. As you can see, DDoS attacks are unpleasant and no one is safe from them. Let’s see, what can you do to protect your website from such a disaster.

How to protect your server from a DDoS attack?

Find a good hosting provider. The hosting is the base of your website, and its safety and performance depend in many ways on how well it is hosted. The hosting provider is in the first place responsible for the measures of protection against DDoS attacks as well, keeping an eye on your traffic, setting up data transmission limits, and installing robust firewalls. If you want to learn more about quality anti-DDoS hosting, read here.
Monitor your traffic. Once a DDoS attack is performed, you will face abnormally high traffic. Therefore traffic is the first thing to keep an eye on if you want to mitigate the impact of a DDoS attack once it’s there. It’s also helpful to have an idea of how your traffic behaves, its tendencies, so it’s easier to notice when something is not as it is supposed to be. To monitor your traffic more efficiently, you can also involve some additional software and hardware solutions that will signalize abnormal traffic spikes.
Set up your firewall. Make sure to achieve the right configuration of your firewall. Let it block the ports that are not involved in your website’s operation – in most cases, these are all ports except for HTTP, HTTPS, and SSH.
Keep an eye on updates. Many DDoS attacks are made possible due to bugs in different applications you are using. The bugs are usually fixed with updates, so the newer the version of your applications, the lower the chances to exploit some of their vulnerabilities.

In conclusion

DDoS attacks are a common kind of cybercrime that can decrease your website’s performance, thus making you lose customers and revenues. But they can be avoided by implying certain measures – starting from finding the right hosting to taking care of your software – and the more the better. We hope that this article has provided you with enough information for you to protect your dedicated server or VPS efficiently from any kind of DDoS attack. Thank you for your attention, take care!