Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can be a huge problem for online businesses as it can severely impede the business’ progress or shut it down completely for a while. The threat can potentially destroy a business website, and deter existing users who become aware of the attack. Fortunately, your hosting provider can shield you from such attacks. According to the most reputed hosting providers in the cloud hosting Dubai industry, the fear of DDoS attacks is one of the primary reasons why online businesses prefer cloud servers to host their website. 

Risk of DDoS

DDoS can force an online business to go offline, preventing visitors including potential customers from accessing the site. The attacks overwhelm a server, exhausting all its resources and/or bandwidth so that users won’t get access to the website hosted on the server. Investing in anti-DDoS solutions is a safe yet expensive approach. 

DDoS attacks can also be just a decoy to distract the business with getting their servers back online while cyber-attackers execute far more harmful cybercrimes. These activities can include virus infections, malware activations, data breaches, network breaches, financial theft etc. 

Hosting & DDoS

Hosting environments are customized for websites. Due to this and because of the fact that traffic is unique for each website, it’s not possible for the web host to implement 100% fool-proof DDoS protection. So essentially, a solution that works for one website may not work for another website. 

A cost-effective, working solution is a hosting service with DDoS mitigation feature. It’s a safe bet to approach a reputed hosting company that know their way around enterprise cloud computing solutions as cloud servers offer comparatively better protection from DDoS attacks. The hosting server would be on a cloud network. An Anti-DDoS hosting service will have server farmers armored against DDoS attacks. The attacks aren’t actually prevented. They are halted or redirected as soon as they begin. 

DDoS attacks come in many forms. A reliable anti-DDoS hosting solution can prevent various forms of DDoS attacks including:

• ICMP flooding: ICMP flooding is one of the most common DDoS attacks where the attacker overwhelms a server with ICMP echo requests. The requests are sent endlessly without waiting for a reply from the server until the server becomes non-responsive and shuts down.
  
• UDP flooding: UDP flooding is when the attacker overwhelms random ports on the server forcing the server to answer the flooding requests and shut down in the process.
  
• Ping of Death: This is by far the most dangerous type of DoS attack meant to crash, destabilize or freeze the target server by sending oversized or malformed packets via ping command. The incoming packets cause the allocated memory buffers to overflow. 
  

There are more DoS attacks that an anti-DDoS server can withstand. Sometimes, attackers may infect the server with malware via mails as a precursor to a DDoS attack. It’s a common pattern that has to be taken seriously. The email hosting Dubai sector has strict mail security standards. Except for cheap email hosting solutions, most hosting services in Dubai provide adequate protection from malware infections.