In the past few months we’ve seen an increasing number of websites fall victim to DDoS cyber attacks. These attacks can be extremely costly in terms of time, resource and lost revenue.

The good news is they’re also preventable.

The purpose of this post is to make you aware of what the risks are and the actions you can take to protect against them.

What is a DDoS attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service, i.e your website, unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.

To give you an analogy, it’s like a group of people crowding the front door to your shop or business, preventing genuine customers from entering and disrupting your normal operations.

What happens if my site is attacked?

It’s usually followed by a ransom request. There’s no real science behind the amount they ask for, it’s not exactly calculated on the perceived value of your business. It can be anywhere in the region of £2,000 – £10,000, often requested in Bitcoins. Paying them is absolutely not a recommended option.

The reality is these attacks can take your site out of action for a whole day, maybe two. This obviously has some bad knock-on effects:

  • Loss of earnings as your whole site will effectively be out of action
  • Bad PR and dissatisfied customers
  • The hassle of migrating your site to a new server (and associated costs involved)

How can I prevent it?

We recommend Cloudflare, the #1 DDoS attack prevention solution. Built to handle massive attacks automatically, it blocks millions of attacks in a matter of minutes each day. It’s huge 10Tbps network is trusted to protect over 4million websites.

How much does it cost?

For £40 per month we can install, monitor and manage Cloudflare on your website. We think that’s a pretty small price to pay in return for the security of your site and complete peace of mind.

If you’d like any further information or want to talk about protecting your site, get in touch using the quick form below.