Creating a stable and secure gaming server might require a series of steps and measures applied. One of available options is DDoS VPS protection, a special solution that is designed to counteract DDoS attacks, a common type of attack where attackers aim to overload your server with artificially created heavy traffic, taking away the precious resources for the needs your server is intended for.
There is a widespread uncertainty among the game server users about whether this type of protection is really needed and whether it can really give a decent level of protection to your gaming experience. So let’s now explore the role of DDoS protection solutions, the perceived contra arguments against it as well as the reasons why it might be something worth investing into.
What is DDoS protection?
DDoS attacks are a kind of cyber attacks that work through overwhelming a server with a huge amount of artificially created traffic consisting of nonsense requests that target a part of your server, eating up all resources and heavily disrupting its performance. DDoS attacks are a common threat to modern servers, often resulting in grave financial and reputational losses when performed successfully.
To protect against this kind of attacks, there are special DDoS protection systems that have implemented various strategies on detecting DDoS attacks and mitigating them. There are the following elements to DDoS attacks protection:
- Analysis and monitoring: By collecting data on how numerous DDoS attacks are performed, DDoS protection systems are taught to reveal the general behavioral patterns of DDoS attacks, thus knowing how to distinguish them from regular normal traffic. The suspiciousness of a traffic can be deduced from various factors, such as the very untypical geographical locations or IP addresses that were already involved in similar activities.
- Filtering and scrubbing: Suspicious traffic is streamed out to special scrubbing centers, liberating the server capacity for healthy legitimate traffic.
- Response planning and mitigation strategies: DDoS protection systems have protocols that help them quickly counteract attacks as they happen and immediately compensate for their impact.
- Post-attack analysis and improvements: After successfully mitigating DDoS attacks, a DDoS collection system collects the data about the attacks and uses it for future improvements of the service.
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Doubts about DDoS protection
Many users of game server don’t consider DDoS protection something that will really work out for them, and their consideration are often followed by the following reasonings:
- Ineffectiveness: Many users think that a sophisticated DDoS attack will hit the server anyway. Sooner or later, an attack will occasionally disrupt the service and this might happen regardless of how well the website is protected.
- Marketing hype: Many users think that DDoS protection is a bubble basically blown up by companies to sell additional services, while the real benefit from them is subject to skepticism. Moreover, why would someone need to attack a private gaming server that doesn’t stand in a way to someone’s business?
- Over-reliance on technology: Some argue that something like DDoS protection actually gives an illusory sense of security, while doesn’t really change much.
- Cost vs. benefit: DDoS protection is associated with additional capital expenses, which may seem unjustified if we’re talking about a smaller server for personal use.
Why is DDoS protection still important?
- Mitigation: DDoS protection doesn’t work according to all or nothing principle. Instead, it gives a certain degree of protection regardless of what eventually happens. If attackers manage to break through your layers of protection, the scale attack will be significantly reduced by the protection system, so the work of your gaming server won’t nearly be as disrupted as it would be in case of a fully successful attack.
- Protection techniques: Good DDoS protection solutions protect your website on different levels, and it becomes more and more evolved with every year, using more and more advanced techniques – advanced algorithms, machine learning, and real-time analysis, leaving eventually as good a chance to potential attackers.
- Economies of scale: Gaming platforms with multiple users may distribute the cost of a DDoS protection solution across multitude of its users, eventually paying insignificant sums while minimizing the risk of severe downtimes caused by DDoS attacks.
- Reputation and trust: If you are a provider of gaming services, maintaining seamless downtime is a critical strategy for your service to remain popular and trusted by users. In this case, investing in additional security measures will pay off significantly.
- Comprehensive security: DDoS protection together with other security strategies can be a great contribution to the general level of security together with other strategies and approaches, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and regular security audits.
Conclusion
DDoS attacks have long been and remain one of the most common cyber threats. They may happen to any game server of any scale, leading to dramatically reduced server performance and downtimes and to increased vulnerability to other cyber threats. All this makes DDoS protection systems critical for achieving a proper level of security of your game server.
