DDoS Attacks: How to Protect Your Online Store

DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly common for online stores. Slow pages, 500 errors, failed checkouts, and PHP-FPM overload can all be symptoms of an ongoing attack. Knowing how DDoS works and how to defend against it is essential for the stability of your business.

1. What is a DDoS Attack?

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is an attack where multiple devices send a massive number of requests to your website to overload it and make it unavailable.

• Attacks on search and filtering
• Thousands of POST requests
• Fake Googlebot crawlers
• Slowloris and request-holding attacks

2. Why DDoS Attacks Are Dangerous for E-commerce

• Slow page load times
• Lower Google rankings
• Checkout malfunctions
• Failed imports, APIs, cron jobs

3. How to Detect a DDoS Attack

Sharp increase in request volume

awk '{print $1}' /var/log/apache2/access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20

High amount of POST requests

grep "POST" /var/log/apache2/access.log | wc -l

High server load with few real visitors

uptime
top
ss -tulpan | grep :443

4. How to Protect Your Store

• Block malicious IPs using ipset
• Enable rate limiting in Apache/Nginx
• Use fail2ban to block repeated aggressive requests
• Enable Cloudflare security filters

5. Example Blocking Command

ipset add ddos_block 203.0.113.10

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