Ultimate Guide to Dedicated Servers – If you’re reading this blog, it means you’re seriously looking into putting your efforts into choosing a dedicated server.
A dedicated server ensures that your website is operating at optimal speed and performance with minimal downtime, removing the chance of losing potential revenue.
Understanding Dedicated Servers
Renting a server exclusively for your needs means that the hosting for your website or software is dedicated solely to you, along with all the necessary resources. By using dedicated servers, you are able to avoid potential issues and losses that are extensive if you choose shared hosting.
Benefits of Dedicated Server Hosting
- Exclusive Hardware obviously, the most advantageous benefit is that a dedicated server offers you a home for your website. Which means that in terms of performance, RAM, CPU cores, and drive space are strictly reserved for you and your online business.
- Superior Performance: Due to your business existing alone, your website is less likely to crash, you’ll have ample bandwidth to handle peak traffic hours, and your website is more likely to load faster.
- Enhanced Security: With dedicated hosting, you eliminate risks such as DDoS, which could potentially cause your website to slow down, as well as substantial financial losses to your business.
- Unmatched Reliability: Reliability remains a top priority. Dedicated servers boast impressive reliability, keeping your site up and running 24/7, 12 months a year. Your website will be able to operate extremely quickly and smoothly, regardless of peak traffic periods.
- Scalability: If your website experiences a sudden influx in traffic, oftentimes with another server (such as a shared server), you will experience slowdowns or even downtime. With a dedicated server, your website will be able to accommodate the sudden increase in traffic.
- Root Access: With a dedicated server, you have root access to your servers, which means downloading a surplus of applications, enhancing security measures, managing users, and setting up backups!
- Affordability: There are cost advantages to choosing Dedicated servers. Renting a server from a dedicated hosting provider makes it easier if you lack the resources to purchase or even manage one yourself. This means that the provider will be able to offer you maintenance as well, which, therefore, keeps your website and business up and running.
- Technical Support: Dedicated server hosting providers offer 24/7 support. If your servers encounter any issues, such as DDoS attacks, support will be able to offer you prompt resolutions to prevent damage to your business.
- SEO Benefits: Dedicated servers impact your SEO positively. With a fast-loading website, 99.9% uptime, and high performance, you are able to improve your search visibility and attract more organic traffic.
- Customization and Control: There is complete control and customization with dedicated servers. You are able to choose the operating system, software, and hardware specifications that mostly align with your business needs and goals.
Ultimate Guide to Dedicated Servers – DDoS Attacks Explained
If we want to explain it in simple terms, it’s the traffic that causes a flood, preventing intended potential or existing customers from reaching the website.
But to put it in technical terms, it’s a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or the surrounding infrastructure with internet traffic.
Ultimate Guide to Dedicated Servers – How Does a DDoS Attack Work?
Infected networks are the ones that carry out DDoS attacks, making it possible for an attacker to control them remotely. These devices are referred to as bots or zombies.
When a victim’s server or network is targeted, each bot sends requests to the targeted IP address, which therefore overwhelms the site and results in a denial of service to normal traffic.
Types of DDoS Attacks
1. Application Layer Attacks
The goal of the attack: Referred to as a layer 7 DDoS attack, the goal of these attacks is to exploit the victim’s resources to create a denial-of-service. The attacks target the layer in the web that responds to HTTP requests.
HTTP Flood: Similar to pressing refresh in a web browser over and over on many different computers at once, This type of attack ranges from simple to complex.
For simpler attacks, the hacker may access one URL with the same range of attacking IP addresses, user agents, and referrers.
For complex attacks, the hacker may use a large number of attacking IP addresses, and target random URLs using random referrers as well as user agents.
2. Protocol Attacks
The goal of the attack: is to cause a service disruption by over-consuming server resources and/or the resources of network equipment, such as firewalls and load balancers.
These Protocol attacks utilize weaknesses in layer 3, as well as layer 4 of the protocol stack to render the target inaccessible.
Syn Flood: You can say that it is similar to a worker in a supply room receiving requests from the front desk. With more and more packages arriving and no confirmation, the worker can’t carry anymore packages, therefore becoming overwhelmed.
3. Volumetric Attacks
The goal of the attack: is to attempt to create congestion by taking in all available bandwidth between the target and the larger internet. Think of it like a black hole.
DNS Amplification: When a request is made to an open DNS server with the IP address of the victim, the target IP address receives the responses from the server.
Mitigation Solutions for DDoS Attack
The major concern is being able to differentiate between normal and attack traffic. DDoS traffic comes in many forms, varying in design from simple to complex and adaptive multi-vector attacks.
The more complex the attack, the more likely it will be to distinguish between real, normal traffic and attack traffic.
Mitigation attempts involving dropping or limiting traffic indiscriminately may throw good traffic with the bad, and the attack may also modify and take shape to circumvent countermeasures.
The best solution? Layers will give the greatest benefit.
1. Black Hole
Black hole and funnel traffic are implemented without specific restriction criteria, which means both legitimate and malicious network traffic is routed to a null route, or blackhole, and dropped from the network.
2. Rate Limiting
Rate limiting means limiting the number of requests a server will accept over a certain time window; this is also a way of mitigating denial-of-service attacks.
Alone, rate limiting is insufficient to handle a complex DDoS attack effectively.
3. Web Application Firewall
A tool that assists in mitigating a layer 7 DDoS attack. Through placing a WAF between the internet and an origin server, the WAF may act as a reverse proxy, therefore protecting the targeted server from certain types of malicious traffic.
4. Anycast Network Diffusion
Anycast network diffusion disperses the attack traffic across a network of scattered servers to the point where the network absorbs the traffic. The size of the traffic and the size and efficiency of the network are what determine how reliable Anycast Network is at mitigating a DDoS attack.
Hosting with Guru
Choosing a reliable hosting performance Guru is especially essential, even when choosing a dedicated server. Due to dedicated servers having a very high uptime, such as 99.9%, this means your site should be running 99.9% of the time, or just under 43 minutes per month.
By choosing GuruDesk as your hosting provider, you are granted 99.9% uptime, maximum performance, and speed, not to mention a free SSL Certificate and a three-layered firewall, all while having 24/7 customer support ready to assist you at any given moment.
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