What is DDoS Protection?

What a DDoS Attack Is (Types in Brief)

A denial-of-service attack makes a service unavailable by exhausting something — bandwidth, connection capacity, or application resources. 'Distributed' means the flood arrives from many sources simultaneously: botnets of malware-infected computers, routers and IoT devices, sometimes amplified by misconfigured third-party servers (DNS/NTP amplification) or rented for a few thousand rupees on darknet markets.

Key points:

• Volumetric attacks saturate bandwidth with sheer Gbps — the firehose.

• Protocol attacks exhaust connection state — SYN floods fill the server's connection table until real users cannot connect.

• Application-layer (L7) attacks send small but expensive requests — HTTP floods hitting search or login — collectively consuming CPU and database until the site crawls or dies.

• Mitigation happens upstream — scrubbing centers drop malicious traffic and forward only clean requests; anycast networks split a 500 Gbps flood into manageable slices across dozens of PoPs.

How Mitigation Works: Scrubbing and Anycast

Mitigation must happen upstream of your server — once the pipe to your origin is full, nothing on the server helps. The mechanics: scrubbing. Traffic destined for your site is diverted, via BGP announcements or DNS, to a provider's scrubbing centers. There packets and requests are inspected in real time: the malicious is dropped — by signature, by rate anomaly, by behavioural analysis — and only clean traffic is forwarded to your origin.

Anycast absorption: protection networks announce the same IP addresses from dozens of global data centers simultaneously. Attack traffic naturally splits across all of them (the internet routes each attacker to the nearest PoP), so a 500 Gbps flood becomes manageable 10 Gbps slices at fifty locations. Rate limiting and challenges — per-IP request caps, CAPTCHA or JS checks during suspected floods — annoy bots and stay transparent to humans. Cloudflare popularised bringing this to every site, with Indian PoPs absorbing local attack traffic close to the source.

Signs Your Site Is Under Attack

Two practical notes on SYN floods: it interacts directly with caching and database response, and misconfiguration is the most common cause of 'hosting is slow' tickets. WebJi® support checks it as part of standard migrations.

Protection Layers: Host, CDN, WAF

Defense is layered, and most layers should already exist:

• Layer 1 — hosting edge: quality hosts filter obvious floods at the network border; WebJi®'s infrastructure includes edge-level attack mitigation for hosted clients, so volumetric noise dies before your account.

• Layer 2 — CDN/proxy: Cloudflare — the free tier includes unmetered DDoS mitigation — sits in front of your origin, hiding its IP and absorbing volumetric and Layer-7 floods across its anycast network.

• Layer 3 — WAF rules: rate-limit abusive endpoints, challenge suspicious traffic, block known attack signatures.

• Layer 4 — application hygiene: login rate limits, caching (cached pages survive floods that dynamic pages do not), scalable infrastructure.

The essential preventive. Hide your origin IP once behind a CDN — attackers who cannot find the origin cannot hit it directly, and direct-to-origin attacks bypass CDN protection entirely. The DDoS protection service details the managed layer.

DDoS vs Genuine Traffic Spikes

DDoS and Genuine Traffic Spikes are not the same product. DDoS is the option with less for you to operate. Genuine Traffic Spikes is the option with more control, and more that you have to look after. Choose by what happens when it breaks at night, and by the INR figure on this page. Email support@webji.services if you want that choice made against your actual site.