How to Stop a DDoS Attack & Prevent Future Attacks

DDoS attacks are a growing threat for websites. But do you know how to mitigate them in their tracks? We’ll cover some essential fundamentals on stopping a DDoS attack and preventing them from happening in the future.

Specifically, as a webmaster, keeping your site online during large traffic spikes is what you strive for. We simply want to make sure the traffic spikes are legitimate and harmless.

We have created a helpful guide that details what DDoS attacks are, the many types of variants, and the motivations behind them.

Here are a few things to understand about DDoS attacks that highlight their impact;

• It costs at little as $150 for criminals / attackers to buy a week-long DDoS attack on the black market.
• A small DDoS attack could cost as little as $10 for the attacker.
• More than 2,000 DDoS attacks occur worldwide every single day.
• The cost of a DDoS attack for the victim can spike to thousands or millions, plus there are some unmeasurable costs—like time, and bandwidth charges

This is different from a site becoming overloaded because of spikes in visits due to the news cycle. I once worked on the website of a political party which became overwhelmed when the party’s manifesto was launched for a general election. That was the first UK election in which e-campaigning was significant and we just weren’t prepared for the volume of traffic.
More Info: what is a distributed denial of service attack