- Aug 24
- 5 min read
DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service, a cyber attack that floods a website or network with traffic or requests until it can no longer serve real visitors. The result is a site that slows to a crawl or goes offline entirely.
DDoS attacks date back to the early 2000s, when attackers began using multiple machines at once to take down a single site. They have grown more sophisticated since, and are now a routine tool for extortion: attackers knock a site offline and demand payment to stop.
Worried about your site going down? Wix hosting keeps your website running smoothly and securely from day one, with reliable performance, strong security and DDoS protection built in.
TL;DR: what is a DDoS attack?
A DDoS attack is an attempt to knock a website offline by flooding it with more traffic than it can handle, sent from many hijacked devices at once so real visitors cannot get through. Because the traffic comes from thousands of sources rather than one, blocking a single IP address does not stop it, so defense depends on your hosting infrastructure.
You'll learn:
What happens on the server during an attack, step by step
The three main attack types and which part of your stack each one targets
Real attacks on the New Zealand Stock Exchange and Amazon AWS, and how they played out
Practical steps to reduce your exposure, from vulnerability scans to incident response plans
How managed hosting absorbs attack traffic before it reaches your site
What happens during a DDoS attack?
The steps below break down the sequence of events that defines a DDoS attack.
Multiple computers or devices, usually machines infected without their owners' knowledge, are pointed at a single website or web server.
The flood of website traffic overwhelms the target, so it can no longer separate real visitors from attack requests.
Because the requests originate from many locations at once, the attack is hard to trace and hard to filter by IP address.
Attackers often follow up with a ransom demand in exchange for stopping.
Examples of significant DDoS attacks
DDoS attacks are not limited to small or poorly defended sites. Some of the most disruptive cases on record have hit national exchanges and major cloud providers.
In 2020, a group of attackers took the New Zealand Stock Exchange offline for several days and demanded a ransom payment to stop.
In February 2020, Amazon AWS absorbed one of the largest DDoS attacks recorded against a business.
According to research collected by Comparitech, DDoS attacks are not only becoming more frequent but also lasting longer, shifting from minutes to days. Longer attacks mean longer outages, and a bigger operational hit for any business that sells online.
Types of DDoS attacks
DDoS attacks are not all the same. They target different parts of a network or application, and knowing the main categories makes them easier to recognize and defend against.
Volumetric attacks
Volumetric attacks aim to consume all available bandwidth between the target and the rest of the internet. They send massive amounts of data, often measured in gigabits per second, to overwhelm the network connection. UDP floods and ICMP floods are common examples.
Protocol attacks
Protocol attacks exploit weaknesses in network protocols to consume server resources or intermediate infrastructure like firewalls and load balancers. SYN floods, which exploit the TCP handshake process, are a typical example of this attack type.
Application layer attacks
Application layer attacks (also called Layer 7 attacks) target the application itself rather than the network. They send seemingly legitimate requests that are expensive for the server to process, such as complex HTTP requests, making them harder to detect and filter than volumetric attacks.
How to reduce the risk of DDoS attacks on your website
There are several things you can do to lower your exposure. These include:
Regularly conduct vulnerability scans and penetration testing to identify potential weaknesses in the website's infrastructure.
Implement firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and other security measures to prevent and mitigate attacks.
Run critical services on infrastructure that can absorb and redistribute traffic. This is where cloud hosting helps, because capacity is pooled across many servers instead of sitting on one.
Develop an incident response plan that outlines how the organization will respond to a DDoS attack, including who is responsible for what tasks and how communication will be handled.
Choosing a platform with strong built-in website security matters more than any single mitigation step, because it moves detection and filtering to the provider rather than leaving it to you.
Potential impact of a DDoS attack
DDoS attacks can be financially damaging and erode brand trust, which in turn affects customer retention. The main ways an attack hits a business include:
Cost to fix: DDoS attacks can be expensive to stop and fix, particularly for small businesses that may not have the resources to implement robust security measures.
Loss of brand trust: DDoS attacks can cause damage to a business' reputation, particularly if they result in extended periods of website downtime.
Lost revenue: every hour a site is unreachable is an hour of orders, bookings and sign-ups that do not happen.
An outage is rarely only a technical problem. It raises support load and cuts revenue too, which is why DDoS mitigation belongs alongside the rest of your cybersecurity basics.
How Wix protects your site from DDoS attacks
When you build a website with Wix, DDoS protection is built into the hosting infrastructure automatically. Wix's multi-cloud architecture, spanning AWS, Google Cloud and Fastly's CDN network, distributes traffic across hundreds of servers and over 200 global points of presence. This distribution makes it significantly harder for an attack to overwhelm any single point.
Wix's security team operates 24/7 monitoring, detecting unusual traffic patterns and responding to threats before they affect your site. This managed approach means you benefit from enterprise-grade DDoS protection without needing to configure or maintain it yourself.
Wix's AI website builder creates your site with all of this security infrastructure built in from the start, so your website is protected from the moment it goes live.
You can also register and manage your domain name directly through Wix, keeping everything in one secure, managed platform.
What is DDoS? FAQ
How can I tell if my site is under a DDoS attack or just getting a traffic spike?
A legitimate spike usually has an explanation you can find: a campaign, a referral, a mention somewhere. It also arrives from a plausible mix of locations and behaves like normal traffic once it lands. Attack traffic tends to hit the same endpoint over and over, come from unfamiliar networks and produce no engagement at all. Your hosting provider’s traffic logs are the fastest way to tell the two apart.
How long does a DDoS attack usually last?
There is no fixed duration. Some attacks are over in minutes, others continue for days, and attackers sometimes stop and restart to keep a site unstable. How long it runs depends more on the attacker’s motivation and resources than on anything about the target.
Can a DDoS attack steal my data?
A DDoS attack is designed to make a service unavailable, not to extract data, so it does not by itself breach your database. It is sometimes used as cover while a separate intrusion is attempted, which is why an unexplained outage is worth investigating rather than just waiting out.
Is a small business website really a target?
Yes. Many attacks are untargeted and simply hit whatever is reachable and poorly defended, and ransom demands scale down to small operators. A small site is also easier to knock over, because it has less capacity to absorb a surge in traffic.
Do I need to buy separate DDoS protection?
It depends on your setup. If you self-host or manage your own server, DDoS mitigation is something you configure and pay for separately. On a managed platform the protection is part of the hosting itself, so there is nothing extra to add.
