How to protect your website against DDoS attacks

"My website is too small to be attacked" is one of the most dangerous assumptions a business owner can make. In practice DDoS attacks hit websites of every size — often fully automated, without the attacker even knowing who owns the site.

What actually is a DDoS attack?

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service — an attack in which thousands (sometimes millions) of computers or devices send traffic to a website at the same time to overload it. The result is that the server can no longer keep up with legitimate visitors' requests, and the website becomes unavailable or extremely slow.

What makes DDoS especially tricky is that the traffic comes from real, often unsuspecting devices — computers or IoT gadgets infected with malware and drafted into a so-called botnet, entirely without the owner's knowledge.

Why are small websites targets too?

Most DDoS attacks on smaller websites are not personal. They are automated scans that probe for weaknesses across the internet, competitor sabotage, or simply "test runs" of botnets sold as a service on illegal marketplaces. You do not need to be a big player to end up in the line of fire.

Which layers of protection actually work?

Network-level filtering. The first and most important layer is network-level protection at your hosting provider, which identifies and filters out malicious traffic before it even reaches your server. This should be standard — not an expensive add-on.

Web Application Firewall (WAF). A WAF analyses traffic at the application level and can block more sophisticated attacks that imitate legitimate visitors, such as slow "low-and-slow" attacks that ordinary network filtering misses.

CDN and caching. By distributing static content across several geographic nodes, a CDN absorbs much of a traffic spike before it reaches your origin server, making attacks less effective.

Round-the-clock monitoring. Automated systems catch most attacks, but human monitoring makes the difference when something unusual happens — for example an attack designed to get around standard rules.

What is included and what is an add-on?

Basic DDoS protection and network filtering should be a given with your web hosting — at DOT Network it is included on every hosting plan at no extra cost. For higher-risk or more sensitive websites there is also SiteLock as an extra layer, with proactive malware scanning and a Web Application Firewall.

What should you do if you are already under attack?

Contact your hosting provider's support immediately — the sooner the network team can analyse the traffic pattern, the sooner they can filter out the malicious traffic. During an ongoing attack you should also avoid making major changes to DNS or server configuration yourself, as that can complicate troubleshooting.