Glossary Entry
What is DDoS Attack?
DDoS Attack without the jargon — the definition, the analogy, and why any site owner should care.
The short answer
A DDoS attack floods a target with traffic from thousands of sources at once, aiming to exhaust its capacity and take it offline.
What follows: the longer explanation, a picture that holds, the practical stakes, and the places you will genuinely meet it.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
0
Jargon left undefined
100+
Entries, all cross-linked
Real
Working examples
Free
To read, always
Because the traffic comes from everywhere simultaneously, usually from a botnet of hijacked devices, blocking sources achieves nothing. What works is upstream mitigation: absorb the flood, filter it, and pass the genuine visitors through. Attack services for hire have pushed the price of a small flood low enough that thoroughly ordinary sites now get one.
Network-level protection is standard on our VPS and hosting plans, which turns most attacks into a spike on a graph rather than an outage. Anything larger becomes a capacity contest fought by the provider instead of by you.
DDoS Attack, by way of an analogy
A hired crowd blocking your entrance. No lock is forced and nothing is taken, but genuine customers cannot get past the bodies until somebody starts filtering who comes in.
Carry that picture with you and most documentation on the topic loses its mystery on a first read.
Where it touches your own site
The threat went mass-market. Small grudges, extortion scripts and botnets being road-tested all end up aimed at wholly unremarkable sites, which is why always-on mitigation counts as hygiene rather than an enterprise add-on.
Nobody expects you to work at this layer daily. The aim is recognising it when it explains something — and that moment is exactly when this page pays for itself.
One worked example
A rival rents a flood and aims it at a gaming community's server. Mitigation scrubs it upstream, players notice a little lag, and the attacker's rental fee buys a bump on somebody else's graph.
Entirely unremarkable once you have seen it — which is the point: most hosting ideas are plain machinery behind an intimidating label.
Where it appears on this platform
You will meet it in the control panel and now and then in a support thread, usually already set correctly. If this one landed, the natural follow-ups are Firewall, WAF, Uptime and CDN.
Support means a person at any hour, and the remit covers the awkward practical questions other hosts hand straight back.
Why a hundred definitions were worth the writing
An unexplained piece of jargon is, to us, a service defect. This is the support team's collected translations, published where a search engine can hand them over on our behalf.
NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching sit under every tier, the smallest plan included — that is the floor here, not an upgrade.
- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
This term, properly landed
DDoS Attack defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
The next step, drawn out
Carry on into Firewall and WAF — ideas rarely travel alone, so the neighbours are linked in.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Nothing teaches a hosting term faster than finding it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
The platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and your setup becomes something you know instead of hope.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — Firewall, WAF and Uptime finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- Softaculous included for one-click application installs
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
- Upgrades applied in place, with no migration when you change plan
- No set-up charge at any point, and no joining fee
- LiteSpeed caching in the server itself rather than bolted on by plugin
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- A renewal figure identical to the one you registered at
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Why would anybody attack my small site?
It is rarely personal. Addresses are what extortion scripts, private grudges, competitor spite and botnets under test go for, not famous names. Since launching one is cheap and automated, bundling the defence in is what removes the question entirely.
Will blocking IP addresses stop a DDoS?
No. By construction, list-based blocking loses to thousands of rotating sources, and you would spend the entire outage typing. Mitigation is a matter of capacity and filtering handled upstream on the network, which is why it belongs to the provider and not to a switch in your panel.
Can I choose the PHP version myself?
Yes — PHP is set per site from the control panel, so a legacy application and a current one can run side by side in one account. Extensions and per-site tuning are on the same screen, and none of it goes near a support ticket.
What happens when I outgrow the plan?
You upgrade in place. Plan changes are made from the client area with no migration and no downtime, and the range runs from small shared accounts through VPS to full dedicated machines. Growth becomes a setting on the account rather than a search for a new host.
Keep reading
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A CDN mirrors your site's assets across servers in many countries, so each visitor collects them from which…
Uptime
Uptime is the proportion of time your hosting is genuinely reachable, and each extra nine on that figure cu…
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