In our last case study, we showed you how we cleaned up a negative SEO attack at Kinsta. Today, we’re going to show you some troubleshooting steps we took to stop a DDoS attack on a small WordPress eCommerce site. DDoS attacks can come out of the blue, and smaller sites are often even more vulnerable since they’re not prepared to deal with it when it happens.
Let us ask you this question. If your site was denmark email list attacked tomorrow, what would you do? If you are out of ideas, then perhaps you should bookmark and read this article.
What is a DDoS attack?
DDoS is an abbreviation for Denial of Service attacks. The main goal of a DDoS attack is to simply overwhelm your web server and cripple it or take it down. One of the frustrating things with these types of attacks is usually that the attacker gains nothing and usually nothing is hacked (read: WordPress Hacked: What To Do When Your Site Is In Trouble ). The big problem with DDoS attacks is the overwhelming load associated with them.
Chances are you will also see your bandwidth
spike to an incredible amount, and this can DDoS Attack in Progresscost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. If you are on cheaper or shared hosting, this can easily result in your account being suspended.
On October 21st, 2016, the largest DDoS (DNS) related attack in history occurred, taking down major companies like PayPal, Spotify, Twitter, Reddit, and eBay. Some even called it the Doomsday of the internet . As the web continues to grow, it’s no surprise that DDoS attacks are increasing at an alarming rate. In fact, according to data provided by easyDNS , DDoS attacks are becoming much worse over time. For a lot of sites, it might just be a matter of time until it’s their turn.
Here at Kinsta, we’re typically able to fend off more attacks than cheaper hosts, simply because of the extra security precautions we have in place, like negative seo (case Study) – cleaning up an attack our implementation of the Google Cloud Platform enterprise-grade firewall . But we also recommend using companies out there that have large infrastructures and software specifically developed to prevent DDoS attacks.
We will always be a proponent of letting the experts do what they do. Cloudflare and Sucuri are two that we recommend for WordPress users, or any type of platform. Investing in decent DDoS protection can save you time, money, and DDoS Attack in Progress frustration down the road. If your site is hosted at Kinsta, you won’t need to go through the Cloudflare or Sucuri setup process . All sites hosted at Kinsta are automatically protected by our Cloudflare integration , which includes a secure firewall with free DDoS protection.
Stopping a DDoS Attack on a Small EDD Site
In this case study, we had a small burkina faso business directory WordPress eCommerce site that was running Easy Digital Downloads . The site typically only generated about 30-40 MB a day in bandwidth and a couple hundred visitors per day. In June, it started using a ton of bandwidth out of the blue, with no additional traffic shown by Google Analytics . The site instantly went up to 15-19 GB of data transfer per day! That’s a 4650% increase . Not good. And it’s certainly not just a small increase in bot traffic. Luckily, the owner was able to quickly spot this in Kinsta’s analytics.
