What is a DDOS Attack?

A DDOS (distributed denial-of-service attack) is an attempt at rendering a server unreachable to it’s visitors. During a DDOS attack your website may become unreachable since the server is being flooded with bogus requests and cannot process the valid ones. Think of this example:

Imagine someone prank calling your phone. It’s like a 1000 people prank calling your phone and tying up the phone lines. Then someone that wants to talk to you tries to call. They might get a busy signal or not get through at all. The phone company may have trouble distinguishing between the “real” phone calls and the “prank” phone calls. The objective of the prank phone calls is to simply tie up the phone lines so no one else can get through to you.

Think of the web server as the phone company that’s handling your phone calls and the DDOS attack is all the prank callers. The legitimate callers are like the “real” visitors to your website. The web server is being flooded with these “prank” calls and therefore cannot process the legitimate “calls”

What does DDOS attacks affect?

DDoS attacks can negatively impact services on the server which may make web pages unavailable as well as email and could affect connectivity to other services like cPanel. Once the attack is mitigated, the services will be restored to their normal functionality.

What is not affected by DDOS attacks?

DDOS attacks do not affect the security of your files, websites, or databases. In no way, is your data compromised during these attacks. There is nothing from a customer standpoint that you will need to do to protect your account with InMotion Hosting.

What does InMotion Hosting do to protect against DDOS attacks?

Our systems administrators monitor our servers 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We use a system to watch for any traffic that may seem suspect in nature. Once we have determined that a server is under a DDOS attack, our systems administrators promptly implement a plan of action to block the traffic or re-route traffic to stop the attack. This can be a complex solution and take some time to implement. Also, at times, there are changes to DNS that may need to be made in an effort to restore service to the affected servers. If this is the case, there can be a time period known as propagation (can be up to 24 hours), while the changes take effect. In these instances, we do everything we can to lessen the impact on our customers and try to speed up propagation as much as possible.

If you need further assistance please feel free to ask a question on our support center.