What Are DDoS Attacks and Why Do They Happen?
In short, 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:
Your competitor wants to attack your website to harm your business and prevent you from making sales and serving your customers
Hackers may attack your website to extract important personal and business data
An attack targeting one or many other businesses with the same IP. Since Shared Hosting plans include an IP that is shared with other people, you will be affected if you’re on the same server
How to Spot 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 you see an exponentially growing number of unexpected requests and use 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.
However, sometimes DDoS attacks can be so big that we are forced to null route your hosting IP, which deems all websites on this server unavailable. Usually, DDoS attacks last no longer than just a few hours. In case you don’t want to wait until your IP becomes available again, you can consider a server transfer.
NOTE
You can perform a server transfer once per month
Other prevention tools are Cloud or VPS Hosting. With these, we provide you with a dedicated IP, which is less prone to DDoS attacks; although they can still happen if attackers get ahold of your IP.