A DDoS attack floods your site with so much fake traffic that real visitors cannot get through. It does not break in — it overwhelms. The defence is filtering the bad traffic before it reaches your server.
How a DDoS works
Attackers use a network of compromised machines to send a huge volume of requests at once. Your server, busy answering junk, has nothing left for real users — so the site slows to a halt or goes down. The goal is disruption, not data theft.
The layers of protection
- A CDN / scrubbing layer (like Cloudflare) absorbs and filters traffic before it reaches you.
- Rate limiting caps how often a single source can hit you.
- A web application firewall blocks known malicious patterns.
- Headroom — servers sized with spare capacity ride out smaller floods.
Defence in depth: no single layer stops everything. A CDN plus rate limiting plus a firewall together keep you online through the vast majority of attacks.
Being ready before it happens
The worst time to think about DDoS is during one. Putting a scrubbing layer in front of your site, monitoring traffic, and having a plan means an attack becomes a managed event rather than an outage. It pairs naturally with a hardened hosting setup.