What Is a DDoS Attack and How to Prevent It?

Understanding DDoS attacks

What Are DDoS Attacks and Why Do They Happen?

In a nutshell, a DDoS, or Denial-of-service attack, is a massive amount of bogus traffic sent to a website in an attempt to take down its host server until it stops working properly.

The major causes of DDoS assaults are:

1. Competition: A rival may target your website in order to harm your business and prevent you from making sales or providing your clients.

2. Data Theft: Hackers may target your website to steal sensitive personal or corporate information.

3. Shared Hosting: If your website shares an IP address with other sites (as is frequent with shared hosting services), an assault on one of them might also harm yours.

How to Spot and Prevent DDoS Attacks

A good indication of a possible DDoS attack is a sudden increase in the number of requests. You may check the visitor section and your bandwidth on the dashboard:

If you utilize Cloudflare and notice an exponential increase in the amount of unusual requests, you should definitely increase your Cloudflare Security level to Under Attack mode. By doing this, Cloudflare will make sure that the bulk of these bogus requests are rejected.

Sometimes, DDoS attacks can be so large that we have to block your hosting IP, making all websites on the server unavailable. These attacks usually last only a few hours. If you don't want to wait for your IP to be restored, you can consider transferring to a different server.