DDoS protection used to be something only banks and game companies paid for. Today, attacks are cheap to rent and small sites are hit every day, often by competitors or bored script users. A few minutes of downtime during a campaign costs real money. Here is what every site owner should know.
How an attack works
A distributed denial-of-service attack floods your server with traffic from thousands of hijacked devices. The server spends all its time answering junk requests and legitimate visitors see timeouts. Attacks range from simple floods that fill the network to clever ones that trigger expensive pages such as search or checkout.
Warning signs
- The site becomes slow or unreachable without any change on your side.
- Traffic graphs show a sudden wall of requests from many countries.
- The hosting panel reports CPU or connection limits being hit.
DDoS protection layers for a small site
Start with what is free: keep software updated, enable caching so that pages are served without touching the database, and use a CDN that absorbs traffic at the edge. The next layer is the network itself. All HostiGuard servers include basic filtering, and our DDoS protection add-on adds always-on mitigation with far higher capacity for servers that are targeted regularly.
What to do during an attack
Do not reboot in a loop; it rarely helps. Turn on the "under attack" mode of your CDN if you have one, block the obvious countries or user agents in the firewall, and open an urgent ticket with the server IP. Our team can move the IP behind the mitigation layer in minutes.
Plan before it happens
Write down who to call, where the backups are and how to switch DNS. Keep a status page on a different provider so customers get information even while the main site is down. With a server that has protection built in and a simple runbook, an attack becomes a short interruption instead of a crisis.
