You can access a completely private server for your website and applications with a dedicated server. Even with its many advantages, sometimes there are still concerns about how safe it is. One threat is called DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which can significantly affect organizations reliant on the internet for work and business. DDoS attacks have affected numerous well-known websites like Yahoo. 

A DDoS attacker can completely disrupt the victim’s network connectivity or reduce the quality of the Dedicated Server. The assault’s primary goal is to make a server become completely incapable of utilizing resources like RAM, CPU, storage, and other network resources. 

What is a DDoS attack?  

A DDoS attack is used to disrupt a designated Dedicated Server’s performance. By overwhelming the target or the infrastructure surrounding it with high internet traffic, the attack disrupts the normal network, service, or traffic.  

It is analogous to an unexpected traffic jam that is caused by fictitious users to prevent genuine users from reaching your application, website, or destination. By using many unencrypted or compromised computer or server systems as the sources of attack traffic, DDoS attacks become successful. 

How to identify a DDoS attack? 

DDoS attacks have a few common symptoms, like a website or an application becoming extremely slow or unavailable. It can be caused by a spike in traffic during your Dedicated Server’s peak hours. Therefore, it is advised to use traffic analytics tools to spot the common signs of a DDoS attack: 

  • Suspicious amounts of large traffic coming from an IP range or IP address.  
  • A flood of traffic from the users sharing a behavioral profile, like web browser version, device type or geolocation.  
  • Odd traffic patterns or spikes, like unexpected traffic at odd hours of the day or unnatural patterns (like the traffic spikes after every few minutes). 

Main Categories of DDoS attacks 

There are three major categories of DDoS attack types – application layer attack, volumetric-based attack, or protocol attack. 

Every type of DDoS attack poses different consequences and intentions, but all of them aim to take the server or web service out of order. Below are explanations of the three types.  

1. Application Layer DDoS attacks 

Application layer DDoS attacks are designed to attack specific applications. Though it can include any application like BGP and SIP voice services, the web server is the most common one. These attacks focus on specific issues or vulnerabilities, resulting in a non-functional website that is unable to deliver the content to the user. 

Such DDoS attacks are typically low-to-mid volume as they must conform to the protocol the application is using, which often includes protocol/application compliance and protocol handshakes.  

2. Volumetric-based DDoS attacks 

Volumetric DDoS attacks overwhelm the internal network capacity and even the centralised DDoS mitigation facilities with high volumes of malicious traffic. Such DDoS attacks attempt to consume the bandwidth between the target network/service and the rest of the internet.  

Skilled attackers tend to combine volumetric attacks with application-layer attacks for hiding the more focused application-level attacks that do the real damage. These attacks leverage the advantage of vulnerable services like NTP, SSDP, DNS, and others, launching spoofed queries that will flood the destination with filling up links, large reply to packets, and many cases, resulting in collapsing of the target’s network infrastructure. 

3. Protocol DDoS attacks 

Unlike application-layer and volumetric DDoS attacks, protocol DDoS attacks rely on the weakness in internet application protocols. And as a number of these protocols are used globally, changing the way they work is complicated.  

Moreover, the inherent complexity of many protocols means that even when they are re-engineered for fixing the existing flaws, new weaknesses are usually introduced, allowing for new types of network attacks and protocol attacks.  

What is a DDoS Protected Dedicated Server?  

DDoS-protected Dedicated Servers use software and hardware for detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks. They have a shield to protect the web service or website from DDoS attacks that result to website crashes, leading to hampered brand reputation and financial loss. 

A DDoS-protected server is considered the best for gaming and ecommerce websites prone to DDoS attacks.  

Mitigate DDoS Attacks with DDos Protection on Dedicated Servers 

 DDoS protection monitors and scans the traffic that comes to your Dedicated Server to determine whether it is malicious or genuine. If the traffic is detected as malicious, it will be rerouted and restricted from passing to the server, leaving the remaining traffic uninterrupted. Therefore, your website does not experience any interruption or downtime even when you are under a DDoS attack.    

Dedicated Servers that include DDoS protection mitigate the problem of their server IP being leaked to their attackers, because the IP itself is protected and forwards clean traffic to the unprotected backend server IP. 

Bigrock offers powerful Dedicated Servers with rock-solid performance and ultimate speed for hosting large websites and apps. Our Dedicated Servers come with DDoS protection, primary IP and 2 free IPs, ease of cPanel management, high stability, advanced 24/7 customer support,  99.9% guaranteed network uptime – all this and more at no additional cost.  

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