DDoS protection is the set of network defenses that keeps your website online when someone tries to knock it offline by flooding it with traffic from many devices.
DDoS stands for “distributed denial of service.” Instead of one computer hitting your site, an attacker uses a botnet (often compromised PCs, servers, or IoT devices) to overwhelm your server, your hosting network, or your application with requests. The goal is usually downtime: slow pages, timeouts, 502/503 errors, or a site that is unreachable right when customers are trying to call, book, or pay.
DDoS protection works best when it happens before traffic reaches your server. Good providers absorb and filter bad traffic at the network edge using techniques like traffic scrubbing, Anycast routing, rate limiting, connection filtering, and challenge pages for suspicious requests. Many setups pair DDoS filtering with a CDN and a web application firewall (WAF) so fake traffic gets blocked while real visitors still load cached pages quickly.
| DDoS style | What it tries to break | What protection usually does |
|---|---|---|
| Volumetric floods | Bandwidth and network capacity | Absorbs traffic on a large edge network, drops obvious junk packets |
| Protocol attacks | Server or network devices (connection tables) | Filters malformed or abusive connections, rate limits, SYN protections |
| Application-layer floods | Your website app (HTTP requests that look “normal”) | Uses WAF rules, bot detection, caching, and request shaping |
For Orlando and Central Florida businesses, the practical impact is simple: if your site is down during business hours, you lose leads you already paid to attract, and Google can start treating your site as unreliable if outages happen repeatedly. DDoS protection is about uptime and speed under pressure, not just “security” in the abstract.
If you’re evaluating hosting, ask your provider these questions: Is DDoS mitigation included by default or an add-on? Does it cover both network floods and application-layer attacks? Is there a WAF? Are there bandwidth caps or extra fees during an attack? How do you get support if the site is under heavy traffic? Our WordPress hosting and maintenance packages are built around stability basics like caching, security hardening, and layered protection so your site stays reachable when it matters.
You can also add a strong extra layer even if you keep your current host: put your site behind a reputable CDN/WAF, enable caching, limit abusive login and XML-RPC activity, and keep WordPress, themes, and plugins updated. HTTPS is still required for trust and modern browsers, and it also pairs well with edge protection, so it’s worth understanding how HTTPS affects SEO and user confidence.
If your site slows down often, that can be a DDoS symptom, but it can also be hosting limits, bloated plugins, or missing caching. This is why we look at performance and stability together, including common causes of slow sites in why websites load slow. If you want, we can take a quick look at your current setup and tell you where your DDoS and uptime gaps are, in plain English.
