Learn
Plain-English explanations of the attacks that take websites and game servers down, and the infrastructure that keeps them up. No jargon, no sales pitch.
Websites and APIs
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack overwhelms a website or API with traffic from many machines at once, until real visitors can no longer get through.
Layer 7 (application-layer) DDoS attacks imitate legitimate visitors instead of flooding the network — which is exactly why traditional defenses miss them.
A DNS amplification attack forges your IP address on small DNS queries so that thousands of innocent servers answer with far larger replies — all of them aimed at you.
A practical, ordered checklist for the moment your site goes down — and for making sure the next attack never reaches it.
DDoS mitigation is the process of spotting attack traffic and dropping it before it reaches the resource an attacker is trying to exhaust — bandwidth, connections, or your application itself.
Both sit in front of your website, both block traffic, and vendors sell them side by side — which is exactly why teams buy one and assume they are covered for the other. They answer two different questions.
A ransom DDoS (RDoS) attack starts with an email, not an outage: pay cryptocurrency before a deadline, or your site goes down. Most of these threats are bluffs — but the ones that are not give you hours, not days.
Browser challenges are useless against machine traffic — and fatal to it. Protecting an API means identifying clients and bounding what each one can cost you.
A WordPress page costs you a database round trip and a PHP worker. It costs the attacker one HTTP request. That asymmetry — not bandwidth — is what takes WordPress sites offline.
Your catalog can be cached. Your checkout cannot. That is the whole problem: the pages that make you money are the pages an attacker can force your servers to compute, one expensive request at a time.
Lost sales are the line everyone reaches for first, and for most businesses it is not the biggest one. Here is how to work out your own number instead of borrowing someone else’s.
DDoS mitigation only works if your server cannot be reached any other way. An exposed origin IP is the most common reason protection is in place and the site still goes down.
Nobody discovers their mitigation was misconfigured at a convenient hour. Here is how to verify every claim your protection makes — without renting an attack, and without taking your own site down.
Most DDoS attacks try to overwhelm you with volume. Low and slow attacks do the opposite — a handful of connections, a trickle of bytes, and a server that stops answering while every graph you watch still looks perfectly normal.
A rate limit is the cheapest control that puts a hard number on something you otherwise only hope about: how much of your capacity any single caller gets to consume.
A content delivery network (CDN) stores copies of your website on servers around the world, so every visitor is served from the location nearest to them.
Minecraft
A Minecraft server is not a website. It holds long-lived connections, spends real CPU on every join attempt, and can be taken off the air by traffic that never looks like a flood on a bandwidth graph.
A bot attack does not try to fill your network link. It makes your server do the most expensive thing it knows how to do — log a player in — thousands of times a second, until nothing is left for the people already playing.
Every login check is bounded: a real account, a solved code, a reconnect. A player who paid all of them can still fly. An anticheat is the layer that watches what happens after the door.
Movement cheats are the easiest to detect and the easiest to detect badly. The rules they break are exact — and so are the ordinary situations that look identical to a check written carelessly.
Combat cheats are the ones your community actually reports, and the hardest to judge — because the difference between a killaura and a genuinely good player is not how hard they hit, it is what their camera was doing.
X-ray is the cheat everyone asks about and the one an anticheat can say the least about, because it breaks no rule the server can observe. Nuker and scaffold are the opposite: they leave evidence a check can act on directly.
A web CAPTCHA can rely on a browser, a rendering engine and a third-party service. A Minecraft challenge has none of those — and the client it is trying to test may not be rendering anything at all.
Every protective layer in front of a Minecraft server assumes attackers have to go through it. The moment your machine’s real address is known, that assumption is gone and the protection is decoration.
Two problems that look unrelated and share a solution: a server should not have to answer every ping itself, and a full server should not have to turn people away.
Comparisons
Itnetic is a Cloudflare alternative for Layer-7 DDoS protection, WAF and CDN — run from the EU, with no feature held back for a higher tier. The free plan and the €1,000 plan ship the same protection. Only the bandwidth differs.
Itnetic is a WEDOS Protection alternative for Layer-7 DDoS mitigation, WAF and CDN, operated from the Czech Republic. Both are EU providers — the difference is where the tier line falls. On Itnetic, application-layer mitigation, the full WAF, per-request logs, the API and the waiting room are on every plan, including the free one.
Itnetic is a DDoS-Guard alternative for Layer-7 DDoS protection, WAF and CDN — operated from the Czech Republic, inside the EU, with published GDPR documentation and a free plan that includes every feature. Setup is two DNS records and no nameserver change.
Itnetic is a CDN77 alternative for teams who need application-layer DDoS protection and a WAF in the same edge as their caching — not a delivery network with volumetric filtering bolted on. Every feature is on every plan, including the free one, and signup is self-serve.