As an operator of an e-commerce website, your biggest fear is probably a DDoS attack that paralyzes your site, making it inaccessible to users and causing sales to plummet. This is especially true if you choose hong kong server rental service, which has a complex network environment and is easily targeted by hackers. But don’t panic! This article will list several effective DDoS defense solutions to keep your Hong Kong dedicated server hosting solution safe and sound!

What is a DDoS Attack?

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service attack. Hackers control a large number of “zombie hosts” to send a massive number of requests to the target server, exhausting its bandwidth and computing resources, making it inaccessible to normal users. Common attack methods include SYN flood, UDP flood, HTTP flood, etc.

DDoS attacks are usually difficult to completely defend against because the attack traffic often comes from zombie networks all over the world, making it hard to block them one by one. Traditional security devices like firewalls can easily be overwhelmed by the massive number of requests. Therefore, effective DDoS defense needs to be approached from multiple levels.

Bandwidth Expansion and Traffic Cleaning

The most direct impact of a DDoS attack is the exhaustion of server bandwidth, preventing legitimate traffic from entering. Therefore, the first step is to expand the server’s access bandwidth as much as possible to increase its resistance to pressure. If conditions permit, consider upgrading to a dedicated 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps high-bandwidth line.

At the same time, professional traffic cleaning services should be introduced. Cleaning service providers deploy high-defense nodes in the backbone network of operators, replacing the server’s public IP with a high-defense IP. Malicious traffic is filtered out at the high-defense nodes, and only clean traffic after cleaning is returned to the origin server. Well-known cleaning service providers include Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and renowned vendors like Cloudflare and Stackpath.

Application Layer Protection and CC Defense

After completing bandwidth and traffic protection, the next step is to strengthen the server’s own attack resistance to prevent application layer vulnerabilities from being exploited by hackers. A WAF (Web Application Firewall) can be deployed to block common web attacks such as SQL injection and XSS.

In addition, CC attacks (Challenge Collapsar) need to be guarded against. CC attacks are a type of flood attack targeting page requests, exhausting server resources by constantly refreshing pages. Frequency limiting and CAPTCHA challenge rules can be deployed on WAF or load balancing devices to defend against CC attacks. For example, Nginx’s ngx_http_limit_req_module supports rate limiting by IP. A sample configuration is as follows:

http {
    limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=mylimit:10m rate=10r/s;

    server {
        location /login/ {
            limit_req zone=mylimit;
            proxy_pass http://my_upstream;
        }
    }
}

The above configuration creates a request limit zone named “mylimit” with an average request rate of 10 per second. If the request frequency of an IP exceeds this limit, the request will be delayed or directly rejected.

Closing Unnecessary Ports and Services

The more ports and services exposed by the server, the larger the attack surface. Therefore, it’s important to develop the habit of minimal installation and only open the ports required by the e-commerce website business, such as 80 and 443, while closing other unnecessary ports.

For installed programs and services, regular security audits and updates should be performed to patch the latest security vulnerabilities and reduce potential risks. Tools like Lynis can be installed to perform system baseline checks:

# Install Lynis
apt-get install lynis

# Start a security audit
lynis audit system

Use the Lynis report to understand the system’s weaknesses and promptly fix and strengthen them.

Preparing an Emergency Plan

Finally, you need to develop a comprehensive DDoS emergency plan. When under attack, contact the server provider for support immediately. Prepare several backup servers in advance and configure website mirrors to quickly switch to backup sites when the main server is paralyzed.

At the same time, immediately notify users of the temporary service interruption and promptly release recovery progress through the official website, email, and social media to reassure users. After the incident, upgrade protection strategies and remedy potential threats to avoid repeating the same mistake.

Summary

DDoS attacks are like fierce floods and savage beasts, but they are nothing to fear as long as you take precautions in advance. Defend against network layer attacks through bandwidth expansion and traffic cleaning; deploy WAF and CC protection to defend against application layer attacks; reduce the risk of being attacked by minimizing open ports and strengthening the system. At the same time, prepare an emergency plan of hong kong server rental solution to stay calm in critical moments.

We believe that with the above solutions, your Hong Kong dedicated server hosting solution will definitely be able to withstand the impact of DDoS and keep your e-commerce website running safely and smoothly. Hackers? Bring it on, we’ll take them down one by one!