How to protect your site from malicious traffic with DDoS-Guard

Imagine waiting all evening for guests, only to be distracted by apartment bullies who ring the doorbell and run away. This can spoil the mood and ruin the evening, but there is a way out. For example, you can invite the concierge or set up an intercom that will not let strangers into the lobby.

The same principle is applied to the DDoS protection system for websites - it fends off external threats that can affect the availability of your website. Let us show you how you can easily protect your business from malicious traffic with the DDoS-Guard module in ispmanager.

A DDoS attack sends large amounts of untargeted traffic to overload a server, making it unavailable to the network.

DDoS attacks can overload the transmission channel, intercept data packets, and make it easier for attackers to find server vulnerabilities and backdoors. For example, an intense attack may cause a system to leak internal data about a DBMS that has hung up and stopped responding.

In a DDoS attack, the damage can be far greater than the loss of customers due to a temporary server outage. Some of the obvious problems that a DDoS attack can cause are:

• Loss of access. While the server is down, the company is losing money. For example, a 3-day attack on Amazon Web Services in 2020 cost the company $5,600 for every minute of site downtime.
• Infrastructure failure. Attacks are not just made against websites, but against any server in the infrastructure. A DDoS attack can take down a server, destroy data from a boxed CRM, or an entire corporate network. For example, in 2007, a DDoS attack brought down email services and payment terminals across Estonia.
• Decrease in SEO positions. Access denials, site infections, and behavioral degradation due to DDoS will lower a resource's search engine ranking. A powerful attack can disrupt an entire SEO campaign, requiring a large budget to recover positions.

In addition, the traffic sent can infect the system and use the server's power for other DDoS attacks. If there is no antivirus and the server fails, the infected device connects to a botnet - a network that sends malicious traffic to other hosts. Such networks are used in all major DDoS attacks. For example, the most powerful attack in history required a network of users to send data to Google's servers at 2.54 Tbps. To accomplish this, attackers conducted small attacks around the world over the course of six months to create a collaborative network.

Although the attack failed, Google did not release the details until three years later. The attack used the networks of four ISPs in China, which sent 167,000,000 packets per second to 180,000 open servers and redirected the responses to Google's servers.

You can connect DDoS-Guard to the ispmanager control panel. This is a paid module that filters traffic and cuts off malicious requests, keeping the system stable.

The DDoS protection system works like a reverse proxy, which provides full protection for the domain. This is more effective than trying to stop an attack by blocking IP addresses or filtering traffic by geo-referencing.

Another feature of the service is a fixed price - unlike foreign counterparts, the user will not have to pay for the cost of malicious traffic after a DDoS attack. Thus, when using hosting with traffic billing, the user does not have to pay for the server load caused by a DDoS attack.

DDoS-Guard is an official partner of ispmanager, so the protection module can be purchased directly from the control panel. Besides, it's cheaper than buying the DDoS-Guard service separately. And when you purchase the DDoS-Guard module for one year, we'll give you a free one-month subscription.

You can purchase a license and install protection against DDoS attacks directly from the ispmanager panel. To do this, navigate to the "Modules" section and find DDoS-Guard.

The next step is to connect the license and add domains to DDoS-Guard. The license is charged for each domain and alias. Subdomains in the system are protected for free if they lead to the same IP address connected to the domain.

The next step is to connect the license and add domains to DDoS-Guard. The license is charged for each domain and alias. Subdomains in the system are protected for free if they lead to the same IP address connected to the domain.

In our documentation we have a detailed instruction on How to integrate and configure DDoS-Guard.