Individual services, entire websites, or even all the services of a web hosting provider can be denied to legitimate users of the web as a result of malicious attacks. The distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) is a low-tech, but effective means of effectively shutting down web services by flooding the available bandwidth of the target system with multiple bogus requests from several sources. Even if your web presence is not the target of such an attack you can still be affected if you share a server or a service with the intended target, or if you utilise services that are targeted.

In January 2009, customers of the discount domain name registrar and web hosting provider GoDaddy experienced what appeared to be a service outage, which turned out to be a sophisticated type of DDoS attack which targeted the whole of GoDaddy’s web servers. Rather than causing a complete outage, however, the attack resulted in a small percentage of GoDaddy customers to experience intermittent disruptions of service for several hours. This is not the first time such a web hosting provider has experienced such an attack, and it certainly will not be the last.

Network security experts are aware of several defences against DDoS attacks, some more effective than others under various circumstances. The important thing is that a web hosting provider have a plan in place for responding to an attack quickly, as it can sometimes still take hours to halt an attack even with an effective defence. This is one situation where size does matter, generally the more bandwidth available to a web service provider the harder it is for an attacker to effectively saturate it. If your web service provider, or your own web presence is negatively affected by normally high Internet traffic then it is likely that you are vulnerable to a DDoS attack, and you should consider upgrading your service as a preventative measure.

Finally, past performance can be in indication of future results, a web hosting provider that has been around for a while certainly has had experience with DDoS attacks. Ask your web hosting provider about how they have been affected by such attacks and what measures they have in place to respond to them. You might also ask some of their other clients how they have been affected by DDoS attacks and how the web hosting provider has responded.