Why is DDoS Protection Important for Web Hosting?

The internet has witnessed a lot of DDoS attacks in recent times so it’s important to know how to protect your website from a DDoS attack. Hackers are coming up with new and interesting techniques for launching their attacks. DDoS is short for ‘distributed denial of service’. It mainly tries to make a website or a network inaccessible to its users. This malicious act is usually carried out by flooding the target host with several requests. There are many separate sources involved in a DDoS attack. Typically from about thousands of IP addresses, and that is why it is very difficult to deflect DDoS attack because there are so many devices initiating the attack. As a result of this, it is essential for a web hosting service to have DDoS protection.

DDoS attacks come in two forms – application and network layers. In 2015, Arbor Network, a network security company, reported that 93% of attacks were targeted at application layers and DNS is the most targeted service. Kaspersky also reported that resources in about 74 countries were subject to DDoS attacks in the first quarter of 2016. In addition, the report also revealed that 10 countries had 96% of their resources targeted in their domains. China has the most incidents of DDoS attacks reported.

In 2018, there have been a series of DDoS attacks with sizes that were overwhelming. GitHub got a piece of the action with a colossal 1.3Tbps attack which led the website going offline for about ten minutes. In the same year, another US service provider was hit by a massive 1.7Tbps attack. This attack was devastating for the company. Some DDoS attacks can last for hours or even days. This type of situation can be very challenging for any security team. This is why it is recommended to host your site where DDoS protection is available.

More Facts About DDoS

A lot of businesses suffered through DDoS attacks. According to a report, 43% of cyber attacks target small businesses. It is also noteworthy that spending on cybersecurity reached $114 billion in 2018 and in 2017, DDoS attacks rose by 91%. For you, it is also important to put on record that the longest DDoS attack took place in the second quarter of 2018. It lasted for 258 hours which is about 11 days. In addition, it is essential to know the nature of these attacks so that it will be easier for you to be prepared. Kaspersky reported that 80.2% of DDoS attacks are SYN-based, 10.6% UDP-based while others are ICMP, HTTP and TCP attacks.

Handling a DDoS Attack

It is very important to manage the attack through a proper PR (Public Relation) approach or strategy. When your website is down, the news may spread like wildfire on social media which may have bad implications for your business. As a result of this, you should be transparent in this regard so that your followers will know what is going on. Ideally, you should use your social media pages to let people know you have been affected. Also, mention the steps you will take to get everything working again. You should also give status updates as regularly as possible. This will go a long way to boost the image of your company.

DDoS Protection

The first thing you need to do is to host your website with a web hosting service that provides DDoS protection. This will go a long way in ensuring that you are safe and you can sleep easy. Also, you should monitor your traffic so that if you notice any unusual increase in traffic, you will start investigating right away. The implementation of rate limiting will also help your server not to be overwhelmed in case of an attack.

Furthermore, you can consider adding filters to your IPTables or cPanel equivalent so that packets from doubtful sources will be dropped. It is also a good idea to use a reliable web application firewall. It will protect your website from dangerous attacks, SQL injections, malware, DDoS attacks. The safety of your website is paramount and you can take the required steps to protect it.

Intellyhost provides complete DDoS protected hosting whether it is shared hosting or VPS Hosting. You will find it a reliable and trusted web hosting service indeed when it comes to security measures.