Glossary
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)
A DDoS attack floods a server with traffic from many sources to overwhelm it and knock a website offline; mitigation absorbs or filters the flood.
A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack tries to make a website or service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from many compromised machines (a botnet) at once.
Types of attack
- Volumetric — saturating bandwidth with sheer traffic (e.g. UDP floods).
- Protocol — exhausting server resources (e.g. SYN floods).
- Application layer — hammering expensive endpoints with seemingly legitimate
httpsrequests.
How it is mitigated
- A
cdnabsorbs and disperses volumetric traffic across its global network. - A
waffilters malicious application-layer requests. - Rate limiting and traffic scrubbing services drop attack traffic upstream.
Why it matters for hosting
Even a brief DDoS can breach an uptime-sla and lose revenue. Choosing a host or cdn with built-in DDoS protection — and not exposing your origin ip-address directly — is a core resilience decision.
See also
WAF (Web Application Firewall)
A WAF inspects incoming HTTP traffic and blocks malicious requests like SQL injection and XSS before they reach your web application.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is a worldwide network of edge servers that cache and serve your site close to visitors, cutting latency and absorbing traffic spikes.
Uptime & SLA
Uptime is the percentage of time a service is available; an SLA is the provider’s contractual guarantee of that level, with credits if missed.
Load Balancer
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers to improve capacity, reliability, and uptime for a website or application.