Ideally, Dedicated Servers give you access to the entire server for your business, website, and application – all to yourself. However, security of such servers is a real concern for the website or online store owners nowadays, and one crucial threat is a DDoS attack.  

DDoS attacks have a significant impact on the companies that are dependent on the internet for their production work and business. Several famous websites like Yahoo have experienced a DDoS attack.  

A DDoS attacker can degrade your Dedicated Server hosting’s quality or break down the victim’s network quality completely. The main intention behind the DDoS attack is to make the server’s user fully or partially incapable of using resources like RAM, storage, CPU, and other network resources. In this article, we will illustrate some of the safe practices to protect your website from a DDoS attack.  

What is a DDoS Attack? 

A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack is an attempt to disturb or hamper targeted Dedicated Server’s normal functioning. Such attacks spoil the normal network, service, or traffic by overwhelming either the target or its infrastructure with heavy internet traffic.  

DDoS attackers make their attacks successful by using unprotected or compromised server hosting or computer systems as major sources of traffic. Precisely, DDoS attack is mainly an unexpected traffic jam which is caused by the unreal users for preventing the authentic users from reaching their destination, application, or website.  

Understanding the DDoS Attack 

The DDoS attack is launched for attacking the victim server in the forms mentioned below:  

  • The attacker may have found a bug or some weakness in the implementation of the software for disrupting the service 
  • Some DDoS attacks may deplete the resources or the entire bandwidth of the victim’s system 

The attackers scan the whole network to find the most vulnerable machines, and thereafter, those machines are used by the attackers’ agents. These attackers compromise hosts’ security for launching DDoS attacks with spoofed IP address, making it challenging to trace the source of the attack.  

What is a DDoS-Protected Dedicated Server? 

DDoS-protected Dedicated Servers use software and hardware for detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks. They have a shield on the hosting server for protecting your web services or website from malicious DDoS attacks which can cause website crashes, further leading to financial losses. DDoS-protected Dedicated Server hosting is considered best for gaming and e-commerce sites which are more prone to DDoS attacks.  

Mechanism of DDoS Protection 

Multiple countermeasures have already been adopted and some of them are still emerging for protecting Dedicated Servers from DDoS attacks. Most of these attacks are caused by intruders attempting to make unauthorized access to the Dedicated Server hosting of the victim. Some widely popular DDoS protection mechanisms are:  

  1. Prevention Techniques 

The saying, ‘prevention is better than cure’ applies to the way of protecting dedicated hosting from the DDoS attacks. One such method is to use filters such as: 

A few other common prevention techniques are – changing IP addresses, applying the security patches, disabling IP broadcasts and unused services, honeypots, and load balancing. This prevention technique is unable to completely remove the risk of DDoS attacks on a Dedicated Server, however, it increases the security.  

2. Detection Techniques 

This method helps victims in avoiding the spread of the DDoS attacks besides preventing the servers from crashing. Some of the common methods are:  

  • Anomaly detection method 
  • Running NOMAD (a scalable network monitoring system) 
  • Packet sampling and filtering technique 
  • Using MULTOPS, a data structure designed for detecting and preventing DDoS attack 

 3. Response to Detection 

In case your Dedicated Server is under a major DDoS attack, your next task should be to block the attack and trace the attacker to find out the identity of the attacker. It can be done in two ways – automatically or manually using Access Control List (ACL).  

Conclusion 

One of the major threats to the network used by e-communication, e-government, e-commerce, e-sport, and e-learning websites is a DDoS attack. In Dedicated Servers and cloud computing, this attack is on a constant rise. Therefore, it is highly recommended to choose a web hosting server which provides protection against DDoS attacks.  

The fact that Bluehost hosts over 2 million websites speaks volumes about our customer satisfaction and success. We provide a wide variety of tools to protect your website against Malware and DDoS attacks.  

Additionally, we offer a free SSL certificate along with all the server hosting plans to enhance your online stores or website’s security besides providing 24/7 customer support services. Therefore, by choosing Bluehost’s web hosting services, you can rest assured that your website is in great hands, and it will be back up and running in no time in the event of a DDoS event.  

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