Denial of service attacks (DDoS) attacks involve multitude of compromised systems attacking a server causing the server to be overloaded and thus shut down, thereby denying customers from reaching your online services.
Several elements can be responsible for DDoS attacks: hackivists”, your competitors, or even some kid doing it for fun. These elements analyse the vulnerabilities in your platform to find slow and CPU intensive elements then construct a tailored attack on your platform.
Popular websites, social networking portals, large online businesses, news websites and government websites are the usual victims of DDoS attacks. Such an attack forces loss of revenue, loss in service quality, loss in customer confidence, loss of business reputation.
How to prevent DDoS on your server?
Your dedicated server must be equipped with anDDoS protection that offers both anti-DDoS technology and anti-DDoS technical support services so that you can get a 100% DDoS prevention solution:
- DDoS mitigation: To prevent high rate DDoS, your web hosting provider should offer specialized hardware to withstand the attack load while allowing rightful traffic to pass through. Check if they offer robust hardware firewalls like Cisco ASA firewalls that offer identity-based access control. But there are limits even for a hardware firewall. There’s no hardware firewall that can handle anything more than 100 Mbps. If the DDoS volume goes above 100 Mbps then no hardware firewall is equipped to effectively protect your dedicated web hosting server.
- Proxy Shield DDoS protection: proxy shield is basically a technology which allows a server owner to create a wall between the internet and the server. This wall prevents the malicious traffic from the internet. It is kind of a service and not a hardware device or an application.
It is always good to be prepared for such disaster situations. If you host your dedicated server with a good UK web hosting company, they will take care of DDoS protection for your server. Check what they can offer you to make sure that your services will not be affected in event DDoS does strike your server. A managed hosting provider will also constantly monitor your server and network for any suspicious activity or load and take proactive measures to prevent any possible attack.
According to a Gartner observation: “It is time to have DDoS protection considered as part of Business Continuity planning, just the way redundant Internet connections and backup data centers are planned for and funded”
