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Guides to DDoS protection, CDNs and Minecraft servers.

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

DDoS protection and CDN

01

What is a DDoS attack?

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.

02

What is a Layer 7 DDoS attack?

Layer 7 (application-layer) DDoS attacks imitate legitimate visitors instead of flooding the network — which is exactly why traditional defenses miss them.

03

What is a DNS amplification attack?

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.

04

How to stop a DDoS attack on your website.

A practical, ordered checklist for the moment your site goes down — and for making sure the next attack never reaches it.

05

What is DDoS mitigation?

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.

06

WAF vs DDoS protection: what is the difference?

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.

07

Ransom DDoS: what to do about an extortion email

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.

08

How to protect an API from DDoS attacks.

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.

09

How to protect WordPress from DDoS attacks.

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.

10

How to protect an online store from DDoS attacks.

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.

11

How much does a DDoS attack cost?

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.

12

How to hide your origin IP address.

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.

13

How to test your DDoS protection.

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.

14

Low and slow DDoS attacks.

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.

15

What is rate limiting?

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.

16

What is a CDN?

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

Game server protection and anticheat

M1

Minecraft server DDoS protection

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.

M2

Minecraft bot attacks and join floods

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.

M3

What is a Minecraft anticheat?

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.

M4

Fly, speed and timer hacks

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.

M5

Killaura and reach hacks

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.

M6

X-ray, nuker and scaffold detection

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.

M7

Minecraft CAPTCHA and player verification

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.

M8

How to protect your Minecraft server IP

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.

M9

Ping floods and server queues

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.