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Distributed denial of service, also known as DDoS, is one of the malicious attacks that attempts to damage a specific system. Along with its consequences, such an attack can significantly damage your website and cause harm to your users, even though it is virtual. Typically, DDoS attackers use several tactics to overwhelm the targeted system. However, if you use the appropriate practices along with an anti-DDoS, you can definitely overcome these attacks and protect your website. Here is how you should proceed.
Minimize attack sources
There are several techniques to protect a website with anti-DDoS protection. The first one is to reduce the areas of your system or website that can be subject to such attacks. This means that you should not expose your system to any port, protocol or anything that is external to your system. Actually, giving access to external resources provides options for attackers to do whatever they want with your website.
That being said, minimizing the eventual points is of great help in mitigating DDoS attacks. You may try to protect your computation resources with some practices such as restricting direct internet traffic, or you can just entrust Koddos, one of the best companies in the domain. The latter will make sure your website is kept away from attacks with their DDoS protected server.
Check your server capacity
In general, most DDoS attacks are huge and volumetric. They use a whole bunch of resources that can definitely overwhelm your website resources in a tickle of an eye without you even noticing. To avoid such things, you can either run larger computation resources or invest in extensive networking that supports larger volumes of resources.
In any case, you will be extending your computation resources on one hand. On the other hand, you may try out load balancers. The latters will help you monitor loads between resources in order to prevent overloading while trying to protect your website. And the good news is that some anti-DDoS protection can help you do that efficiently.
Get to know what is normal with your system or not
Knowing what is normal in your system and what is not helps you decipher abnormal traffic. Just as we have mentioned that you should not expose your system to any portal, you should also not get in the flow of any traffic. But to do this, you should get to know the characteristics of good traffic.
Moreover, whenever you detect elevated amounts of traffic hitting a host, the basic thing to do is to accept just what your host can handle. Going beyond that will simply result in overloading, and this is not good for the safety of your website. However, some advanced anti-DDoS protection can technically accept any traffic provided that it is legit, after analyzing each individual packet.
Use firewalls and sophisticated technologies
Another good practice to optimize your anti-DDoS protection is to use firewalls and other technologies that can be a valid barrier to any abuse of your system. In addition to that, you may try to set customized limitations that can prevent illegitimate and unusual requests.
You can look for clues such as good traffic hiding bad IPs, unexpected geographic locations and more. Along with your anti-DDoS protection, you can set your computation resources to study and detect traffic patterns that can be harmful to your system to create customized and efficient protections.