If your business relies on its online presence, a sudden outage can feel catastrophic, and often it is not an accident. One of the most common culprits is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. According to Cloudflare, these attacks were up 358 per cent year on year, and we have fended off plenty of them for clients.
What is a DDoS attack?
It is an attempt to make a website or service unavailable by flooding it with traffic from many sources at once. Picture a hotel lobby suddenly packed with people who are not checking in, just blocking every door so real guests cannot reach the desk. The traffic usually comes from a botnet: hijacked laptops, routers and smart devices controlled remotely.
Who is behind them, and why?
- Hacktivists making a political point.
- Unethical competitors timing an outage for your launch or sale.
- Extortionists demanding payment to stop, which rarely ends the problem.
- Distraction while attackers break in elsewhere. The DDoS is the smoke; worry about the fire behind it.
- Amateurs using ready-made tools out of boredom.
Why are smaller organisations more exposed?
SMEs often run entry-level hosting that cannot absorb a spike, lack traffic filtering such as a CDN, web application firewall or DDoS protection, and have never rehearsed an incident response.
The bottom line
Talk to us about hardening your website and hosting, or book a consult to review your resilience.
Written and reviewed by Noah Greenstone, Founder and Principal Consultant. Last reviewed 13 August 2025.
