The modern internet is full of digital threats. Cybercriminals have developed a bunch of ways how to spoil the lives of innocent website owners. One of the most common ways to put a spoke in a website’s wheel used by hackers is DDoS attacks. These attacks exploit the way the website’s inner communication works and get it overloaded with pending requests so the website either slows down or experiences downtime.
An efficient way to deal with this kind of threat is to find a DDoS mitigation provider or to deploy your website on a DDoS-protected dedicated servers Europe, a service where the host applies special measures aimed at protecting your website from DDoS attacks. Today we want to have a look at what aspects you have to consider when looking for a DDoS protection provider.
Aspects of choosing a DDoS mitigation provider
How does DDoS mitigation work?
To better understand what is to be considered when choosing a DDoS mitigation provider, it’s essential to have a general understanding of DDoS mitigation’s principle of operation. The process of DDoS mitigation generally consists of four stages:
- Detection: At this stage special monitoring software becomes aware of anomalies in the regular flow of traffic. At this stage, the key aspects are the precision of the appropriate software and its reaction speed. Once abnormal traffic is detected, the application proceeds to the next stages.
- Diversion: At this stage, the traffic that doesn’t conform to what regular traffic is supposed to look like is routed away to the DDoS mitigation service.
- Filtering: Now the traffic passes through the algorithms of the DDoS mitigation systems, which detects, what traffic is actually malicious and what is not based on certain patterns. This stage aims at minimizing the effect of DDoS attacks to the point that it doesn’t at all affect the eventual operation of the website.
- Analysis: After surpassing a DDoS attack, the system collects the data about it to trace the attack back and to improve its performance in the future.
Things to keep in mind when looking for a DDoS protection provider
Considering the components discussed earlier in the article, there are different parameters that can be beneficial at this or that stage of the DDoS protection procedure. In particular:
- Network capacity: DDoS protection relies primarily on the network of the provider, so the more potent and sophisticated the network is, the more efficient it is. The capacity of a DDoS mitigation network is expressed primarily in the amount of traffic it can handle (like 1Tbps or whatever). The more traffic it can handle, the higher the chance for heavy DDoS attacks to go unnoticed.
- Processing capacity: If network capacity refers to how much traffic the DDoS protection can handle per unit of time, processing capacity refers to how much of this traffic the tool is capable of analyzing (measured usually in Mpps – millions of packets per second). The more processing capacity, the faster it processes the traffic in question, which again affects the eventual smoothness of your website operation in case of a DDoS attack.
- Time to mitigation: Time to mitigation refers to the speed of the protection mechanism’s reaction. Although this aspect is a bit arbitrary, as the exact moment when the attack is detected and subsequently dealt with is, it can be approximately calculated by the provider, and in consequence, the provider may give an approximate guarantee of how long it can take for the attack to be mitigated. This parameter is essential and even more essential than it might seem at first glance. If a heavy DDoS attack manages to hit your website, fully restoring its operation may take hours even after a few minutes of, so you should really inform yourself about what time to mitigation a provider offers.
- Different approaches to face attacks of different levels: Different types of DDoS attacks can target different aspects of your system, and need therefore different techniques to be mitigated. Network layer attacks are attacks of a bigger scale that aim to lay down your website. To mitigate such attacks such approaches as IP masking, sinkholing, routing, or scrubbing are used.
Another type of attack, application layer attacks, aims at interfering with the operation of single applications, trying to go unnoticed and mimicking the normal traffic. To detect such attacks, profiling HTTP/S traffic is the required approach. - Pricing models: DDoS mitigation services can be priced according to different models.
- Pay as you go: You subscribe to the service and you pay only in case of an attack. The positive side is that you don’t need or almost don’t need to pay for the service without the real issue, but the negative side is that in case of a real issue, you may be charged a lot.
- Service-based: There is a fixed regulated price for the DDoS mitigation on its one and additional services cost additional money. This is a pretty flexible model with which you can choose directly what you need and what you can do on your own.
- A flat monthly fee: There is one fixed monthly price. If it and the services that come with it satisfy you, this might also be an option.
Conclusion
DDoS attacks can be disastrous for the operation of a website, therefore taking care of a DDoS mitigation solution is vital. In this article, we’ve broken down what DDoS mitigation consists of and what services of this kind may have to offer. We wish you good luck in finding the right solution for your website, take care!