Security & Compliance
DDoS Protection
Defenses that absorb or filter distributed denial-of-service attacks, where floods of traffic try to overwhelm your server.
A DDoS attack floods your server with more traffic than it can handle, from thousands of machines at once, until legitimate users can't get through. DDoS protection is the layer that absorbs or filters that flood before it reaches you, distinguishing attack traffic from real visitors and dropping the former at scale you couldn't manage alone.
The best defense is sheer capacity, which is why CDN and edge providers are so good at it. Cloudflare sits in front of your origin and soaks up attacks across its enormous network, and its protection is included even on the free tier. Many hosts bundle basic volumetric protection too, though the sophisticated application-layer attacks need the specialists.
For most sites, putting a provider like Cloudflare in front is the pragmatic answer: it handles caching, TLS, and DDoS absorption in one move, and hides your origin's real address so attackers can't bypass it. Running a naked origin server exposed directly to the internet is the setup that gets knocked over.
Go deeper
- Cloud Hosting Security: What's Your Job vs the Provider'sThe shared responsibility model, and the specific things people forget to configure.