Remote DDoS protection is nothing new, but it may be a term you are not yet familiar with. The purpose of remote DDoS protection is to stop DDoS attacks from taking your site offline without having to change your hosting. DDoS attacks plague website owners, most notably businesses in the financial sector. However, they are becoming so prevalent — and easier to launch — that more and more businesses are seeing the results of having no protection for their website. This can be a troubling ordeal, especially for ecommerce sites during the holiday season. With the holidays fast approaching, if you are looking for a way to protect your website, now is the time to filter through the facts and find the best solution for your business.
What is remote DDoS protection?
Remote DDoS protection is simply an anti-ddos service that protects your website from DDoS attacks without any changes to your hosting. This may be hard to wrap your head around, but it’s really simple. When you activate remote DDoS protection with any provider they will make a change to your DNS to point the traffic coming to your website to their IP. This has two purposes:
- to hide your real IP from the attackers;
- to proxy traffic through their anti-ddos mitigation system.
The entire process typically goes like this:
First, your current hosting provider will need to issue you a fresh IP. This IP is then sent to your DDoS mitigation provider and the DNS changes are made.
At this point, the outward facing IP for your website will be your DDoS protection provider’s. They will receive the traffic going to your website, filter the attack traffic and forward legitimate visitors back to your site. The entire process of filtering and rerouting traffic occurs without your visitors noticing.
What are the benefits of remote DDoS protection?
One of the major benefits of remote DDoS protection is the fact that you do not have to change your current hosting. This means that protection can be set up very quickly, literally within minutes. There is also a cost savings to using remote DDoS protection. If you only require protection at certain intervals throughout the year, remote DDoS protection can be a viable alternative over full-on DDoS protected hosting. There are a number of large ecommerce sites that will employ this tactic in order to have ‘on demand’ protection during important times of the year.
Drawbacks of remote DDoS protection
With benefits come drawbacks in most cases and in this instance there can be a few drawbacks to remote DDoS protection. The prime drawback for customers seeking year-round DDoS protection is the added expense of paying for protection and hosting separately. One bill is always better than two.
If your company has serious hosting needs, both in terms of performance and protection, you are almost always better choosing a company that can handle both. This is of course if you do not have the capability of managing a DDoS attack yourself, which is nearly always too costly for most businesses, even large ones.
Should you choose remote DDoS protection?
If you need a fast response to an attack and require immediate DDoS protection you are always going to get back online faster by choosing remote protection. Remote DDoS protection is also a good option if you seldom experience attacks.
On the other side of the coin, if you need mission-critical hosting and cannot afford to go offline you should seriously consider moving to a DDoS protected server.
Need help with DDoS attacks? Talk with a mitigation specialist about your needs.