What is a DDOS attack

What is a DDOS Attack?

A DDOS or Distributed Denial Of Service attack is when a website or web service is intentionally overloaded with requests until it becomes slow, unresponsive, or crashes entirely. the distributed nature of this attack means the requests occur from machines in many physical locations. This makes these attacks extremely difficult to stop as you can’t easily limit requests from a particular origin.

Should I worry about a DDOS attack?

In short, if you are a small business you shouldn’t worry too much about a potential DDOS attack. Small scale DDOS attacks can happen infrequently but often the cost of protection will outstrip the minor service reductions (slow page load etc) during these times. Also as a small business you are unlikely to directly be the attention of any larger scale attacks. The most significant impact of DDOS attacks to small businesses will most commonly be if your hosting provider are themselves attacked, which can happen from time to time. Your hosting provider should be more than capable of informing their customers and dealing with the threat themselves. Just be aware that this could be a very infrequent cause of downtime for your site or service.