Support Start > Denial of Service Attacks

We're occasionally contacted by site owners who are using another hosting company and having problems due to a denial of service attack on their site. The potential customer asks if we can protect against this.

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Although we sympathize with people in such situations, and we realize that it’s not their fault they’re being attacked, we can’t (and don’t) host sites that expect to receive denial of service attacks. Hosting them causes serious problems for other sites on our network.

Defending against such attacks takes specialized infrastructure that normal hosting companies don’t use. We can handle fairly high volumes of legitimate visitors to your site (in fact, we take pride in doing a better job of that than most companies), but denial of service attacks are a completely different thing. For example, we’ve seen attacks that generate twenty times as much traffic as all the rest of our customers combined. The only way a company can handle an attack like that is to buy twenty times the networking resources they actually need, which isn’t possible at the prices most hosting companies charge.

There are companies that specialize in handling denial of service attacks. They’ve invested heavily in the expensive equipment needed to properly defend against it. Unfortunately, they tend to be a lot more expensive than normal hosting companies as a result.

In some cases, it may be possible to use the free Cloudflare proxy service, which can defend against certain types of attacks (but not all). If that’s not sufficient, the most well-known (and perhaps most expensive) company in that industry is Prolexic, and a Google search for “ddos protection” will show more.