What is a denial of service or DOS attack?

Technology has become more advanced, and with it, hack and DoS attacks in the online world are increasing at an alarming rate. The only way to avoid DoS or DDoS attacks, is to have intelligent monitoring of your web traffic.

By using an automated self-learning system, risks can be mitigated. Thus you can sleep without worry at nights, knowing that your online content and confidential data sees no threat or interruption. But unfortunately, the initial costs of setting up such a system is way too high, and can only be afforded by huge corporate establishments.

A recent example of DoS attack is the infamous website fliphtml5.com that sells automation desktop tools for online publishers and marketers. Its not certain as to whether the attack is DoS, as mentioned in above message, but at the time of writing this article, the site is surely missing all its content on the server – none of the indexed urls in Google are working.

What is a denial of service or DoS attack?

Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks are by far the most notorious kinds of attacks. That is because, any level of hacker with a small investment can bombard a victim website, with millions of requests, and make them look like they are legit users. This eventually crashes the web server, and makes the site offline, requiring manual intervention to bring it back online.

If the victim website is an ecommerce site, that means thousands of dollars lost in sales, and a bad reputation. Identifying a DDoS attack early is the best option. You can have firewall systems that allow blocking traffic that is not desirable. Sudden spikes in traffic is a red flag, and must be closely monitored. Those are the works of a Network Engineer. More details here.

But what can small business owners do? They cannot afford expensive DDoS prevention hardware, or perhaps, not even hire experienced network professionals, who can configure the firewall softwares. They are simply at the mercy of their hosting company. And if the hosting company cannot afford that infrastructure, then that is bad risky business. Dont worry, we do offer a solution too, just hang on…

Besides prevention, one critical aspect is recovery of an offline website. Each minute lost, is valuable sales and reputation lost.

Coversine can help small business owners take care of their website uptime, or even their VPS / dedicated server uptime, at affordable costs. And no, we are not talking about a monitoring service that notifies you whenever your site goes down. We offer the complete exclusive service of maintaining the site / server uptime, which means we regularly backup your site on your behalf, and recover your site, in case of hacks/attacks/etc. Click the links above to learn more.

Of course, prevention is better than cure, and thats why the subscriptions above, take care of performance checks, and regular updates to softwares and apps as well. You are in good hands, when you are with us…rest assured!