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Hosting Terms

What is DDoS Attack?

What DDoS Attack really means, with the jargon taken out — plus the example that makes it obvious.

Straight answer first

A DDoS attack floods a target with traffic from thousands of sources at once, trying to use up its capacity and take it offline.

Below: the fuller explanation, a picture that makes it stick, why it matters in practice, and where you will actually run into it.

Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026

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Because the traffic comes from everywhere at once, usually from a botnet of hijacked devices, blocking sources is pointless. Mitigation absorbs and scrubs the flood upstream instead, letting genuine visitors through. Rentable attack services have made small floods cheap enough that ordinary sites now see them.

Network-level protection comes as standard on our VPS and hosting plans, which turns most attacks into a spike on a graph rather than an outage. Anything larger becomes a capacity contest fought by the provider, not by you.

DDoS Attack, by comparison

A crowd hired to stand in your shop doorway. No lock is forced and nothing is stolen; real customers simply cannot get past the bodies until someone starts filtering who gets in.

Keep that picture in mind and most of the documentation you will ever read on the subject stops being mysterious.

What it means for your own site

The threat has gone mass-market. Petty disputes, extortion scripts and stray botnet tests all point at perfectly unremarkable sites, which makes always-on mitigation basic hygiene rather than an enterprise extra.

You do not need to work at this layer every day. You need to recognise it when it explains something, which is exactly the moment this page earns its keep.

One concrete example

A gaming community's server is hit by a rival's rented flood. Mitigation scrubs it upstream, players notice a little lag, and the attacker's rental fee buys them a bump on somebody else's graph.

Perfectly ordinary once you have seen it, which is rather the point: most hosting concepts are simple machinery wearing an intimidating name.

Where you will meet it on our platform

You will meet it in the control panel and occasionally in a support conversation, usually already set the right way. If this term made sense, the natural next reads are Firewall, WAF, Uptime and CDN.

Real people answer the counter at any hour, including the awkward questions other hosts wave off as out of scope.

A shield icon standing in for site security and DDoS filtering

Unexplained jargon is bad service

We treat unexplained jargon as a service failure. This glossary is the support desk's accumulated translations, published where a search engine can hand them out for us.

NVMe disks and LiteSpeed caching sit on the shelf at every price point, not behind a premium tier.

  • 100+ terms, all in plain English
  • Everyday comparisons and real examples
  • Related concepts linked together
  • Written by the people on the desk

Why Hosting Seller

On every plan, as standard

Grounded in real kit

Examples point at hosting you would actually use, not at an abstract diagram.

One term, fully landed

DDoS Attack defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.

The stakes spelled out

Not only what it is, but when it turns out to be the answer to a problem you are having.

Linked, never siloed

Related terms cross-reference each other, so one lookup grows into a working understanding.

The next reads, mapped

Read on into Firewall and WAF — terms rarely stand alone, so the neighbours are linked.

Pictures that stick

Each concept gets a comparison you will still remember at the moment you actually need it.

First Steps

From choosing to live

  1. 1

    Find it in your own account

    The quickest way to learn a hosting term is to find it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading about it.

  2. 2

    Check what the defaults are

    Our platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and you will know your setup instead of hoping about it.

  3. 3

    Follow the terms next door

    Concepts travel in packs — Firewall, WAF and Uptime finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.

In the Box

Packed with every plan

  • Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
  • Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
  • DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
  • LiteSpeed caching running at the server, not bolted on by plugin
  • Staging copies so changes get tested before they go live
  • The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
  • Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
  • A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
  • The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
  • WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing

Across the Counter

The questions we get asked most

Why would anyone attack my small site?

It is rarely about you. Extortion scripts, personal disputes, competitor spite and botnets being tested all pick addresses rather than famous names. The attacks are cheap and automatic, which is exactly why having the defence included makes the question moot.

Can I stop a DDoS by blocking IP addresses?

No. Thousands of rotating sources defeat list-based blocking by design, and you would spend the outage typing. Mitigation is a capacity and filtering problem solved upstream at network level, which is why it belongs to the provider rather than to a setting in your panel.

Can I set the PHP version myself?

Yes — PHP versions are chosen per site from the control panel, so an old application and a current one can sit side by side on the same account. Extensions and per-site settings live in the same screen, and none of it needs a support ticket.

What if the site outgrows the plan I bought?

You move up in place. Plan changes are made from the client area with no migration and no downtime, and the range runs from small shared accounts through VPS to whole dedicated servers. Growing becomes a line change on your account rather than a hunt for a new host.

Is the SSL certificate genuinely free?

On every plan, with nothing held back. The certificate is issued the moment your domain points here and reissues itself well before expiry. The encryption is the same as a paid DV certificate — paid tiers exist only for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.

Who actually runs the company?

Hosting Seller is a trading name of Bohzo Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales — a real business with a public record and terms published under English law. Looking that up is worth doing about any host before you hand over your domain.

How do I pay, and does it bill again on its own?

Orders go through a secure checkout by credit or debit card, and the renewal is taken at the same price you first paid. Every invoice sits in the client area for you to read, and switching auto-renewal off is a toggle in your account rather than a phone call.

Packing up and moving host? Take our checklist.

A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.

One email carrying the checklist, then the odd note on running a site well. Step off the list whenever you like — our privacy policy spells out the rest.

Whenever you're ready to order.

Quick NVMe hosting, SSL and the move in included, and real people on the counter at any hour — on a price that doesn't shift.

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