One moment your website is fine - the next, it is unreachable. A DDoS attack has many faces: an overwhelming flood of traffic designed to make your site collapse under its own weight. Understanding the attack is the first step to surviving it.

Table of Contents

What a DDoS Attack Is

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. Attackers use networks of infected computers (botnets) to send enormous volumes of requests to your server at once. The server spends all its resources handling junk traffic, and real visitors are denied service - your site appears 'down'.

How Attacks Work

Attacks come in a few flavours: volumetric floods (raw traffic), protocol attacks (server resource exhaustion) and application attacks (sending slow, tricky requests that tie up your application). Modern attacks often combine all three to bypass simple defences.

Signs You Are Under Attack

  • Your site slows to a crawl or times out.
  • CPU and bandwidth usage spike far beyond normal.
  • Error messages like 502, 503 or connection timeouts.
  • Traffic from many unknown IPs flooding your logs.

How to Protect Your Site

  1. Use a cloud WAF/CDN like Cloudflare - it absorbs attacks and filters traffic before it reaches you.
  2. Choose a host with DDoS mitigation - good providers monitor and filter at the network level.
  3. Rate-limit and block suspicious IPs and countries.
  4. Keep your site optimised - a lean, cached site survives pressure better.
  5. Have a response plan - know who to contact and what to do immediately.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a DDoS attack last?

Minutes to days. With proper mitigation in place, most attacks are absorbed and your site stays online while they fizzle out.

Is my shared hosting safe from DDoS?

Good shared hosts filter basic attacks at the network level, but a serious attack is best handled by a WAF in front and a provider with real mitigation.

No site is immune, but layered protection makes you a boring target. Put a WAF in front, keep your host strong, and DDoS attacks become background noise.