A DDoS or denial-of-service attack is a large scale of fake traffic that is sent to a website in an attempt to weaken its host server until it fails to work properly.
The most common reasons for DDoS attacks are:
An unfair competitor seeking to harm your business and prevent you from making sales and serving your customers.
Hackers trying to extract personal and business data for malicious purposes.
An attack targeting one or many other websites that have the same IP as yours. Since web hosting plans use a shared IP address, your website could also be affected by an attack aimed at another site hosted on the same server.
How to identify and prevent DDoS attacks
A good indication of a possible DDoS attack is a sudden increase in the number of requests. You can check it in your Access Logs section under the Analytics tab.
If an exponentially growing number of unexpected requests is shown, and you are using Cloudflare, it’s highly recommended that you change your Cloudflare Security level to Under Attack mode. This will ensure that Cloudflare will reject the majority of these fake requests.
If your hosting plan is web Business or greater, you can enable Hostinger CDN and use the Under Attack Mode in case of a suspected DDoS.
However, sometimes DDoS attacks can require greater measures, such as forcing reCAPTCHA on your site or even nullrouting your hosting IP, which renders all websites on the same server temporarily unavailable. Usually, DDoS attacks last only a few hours – our monitoring tools work to resume the service as quickly as possible.
If you prefer not to wait for your IP to become available again, you can consider a server transfer. You can perform a server transfer once per month.