How a DDos attack can affect your online performance?

Downtime can be frustrating for customers if they are unable to access website of an online business. One of the reasons for denial of access could be insufficient hosting resources where the servers or entire network stop functioning due to overwhelming requests from the users. For instance, during holiday season, some e-commerce websites experience sudden surge in traffic and become unavailable to the users until the problem gets resolved.

Unfortunately, sometimes DDos or Distributed Denial of Services attack could be intentional caused by malicious attackers or hackers. Through multiple sources, hackers or attackers overwhelm the server or network with more traffic than it could deal with and make it impossible to serve the legitimate requests from the users. DDoS make systems vulnerable and threaten the continuity of business activities. The intention of DDoS attack is either to sabotage & demand money or bring down the competitor's site on purpose. When the site is under malicious attack, it may slow down the website performance or completely make it unresponsive to the users requests. Dealing with such issues is not easy as it requires flexible hosting plan to accommodate the surge in site traffic, a quality website monitoring service to track sudden changes in website traffic & performance and DDoS mitigation services to protect networks & servers from the possible attacks.

Impact on online websites

It is hard to conclude on the motive but this type of volumetric attacks can be frustrating and potentially harmful to business profitability because it may take hours to days to identify the real problem and get the site back to working normally. While businesses of all sizes experience DDos attack, larger companies have significant negative impact because it also affects other capabilities like security, customer service and sales. When an attempt is made to bring down web based applications or services using DDos attack, site visitors will experience interruption to normal and consistent online services.

Despite various efforts to defend against these attacks, there will be some loss of service to the website traffic based on the complexity of the issue. That means depending on the intensity of attack the users are going to notice disruption in website services for significant time period ranging from days to even months. When such instances happen, the customers will get dissatisfied with the website performance and flock to competitors site, causing financial and reputation damage to the businesses.

Dealing with DDos

As far as site downtime is concerned, taking preventive steps is much better than implementing corrective actions when issues happens. As a preventive measure, some websites are opting for scaled up server capacity or extra bandwidth than it is actually required to accommodate sudden and unexpected spikes in traffic. While some others are adding extra service from hosting providers to block or divert malicious traffic coming to their websites. Nevertheless, these options are only temporary solutions but do not provide complete protection for the websites. Now-a-days, many online websites are finding site monitoring services as effective approach in reducing the intensity of DDoS attacks, because they not only monitor various network activities & track changes in site traffic but also promptly alert about the issue so that enhanced problem resolution procedures can be put in place quicker. DDoS is a complex topic that needs support of experts to resolve. The website monitoring service allows a regular person to know when expert help is needed to resolve the issue.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitoring service uptime and check availability and performance of Internet-connected devices.