What is DDoS? The Problem and Solutions

Since we became a Cloudflare partner, we’ve been asked multiple times: What is a DDoS?

The Rundown on DDoS Attacks

A DDoS is a distributed denial of service attack.

Years ago when a business needed to get online, they purchased web hosting services through many web hosting companies. It was usually on a single server for the client, shared between multiple other clients depending on how the request into the machine. At the time most servers were capable of handling the load of a lot of requests, sometimes in the hundreds, if not thousands per second.

Now comes along somebody you made an enemy with. Knowing the capacity of your server, they would then utilize hundreds, thousands, or millions of compromised machines in a coordinated attack to overload your server online. This caused your business to suffer online, drop off search engines, and prevent your business from being accessible and communicating online. Email, web, DNS, and even name registrars were not immune to this attack. They were very common about 10 to 15 years ago.

Cloudflare and Other CDNs

Now, where does Cloudflare come in?

Cloudflare is what is known as a CDN. A CDN is a content delivery network. A content delivery network delivers content in a distributed manner to those who request it. In its most basic form, they have hundreds if not thousands of servers acting as one to satisfy the content request for someone requesting it. That basically means that you have dozens of data centers to handle any number of content requests easily. One of the greatest strengths of this content delivery network is the ability to mitigate DDoS. Since hundreds if not millions of servers are handling requests promptly, your website, the content isn’t compromised, and you can still be productive in your day-to-day operations.

There are many other features with the Cloudflare CDN, but the biggest one is mitigation of distributed denial of service attacks. For businesses that need to be number one on the Google page ranks, being or Yahoo, a CDN is required. Want to learn more about CDNs? Check out our other blog, Denial of Service Attacks and CDNs like Cloudflare. Want to get started? Then contact Trition Technologies so we can talk more about proactive website security and IT support.