I was just wondering what "DDoS attack" actually means. I know it's got something to do with hackers damaging a forum or something like that but thats all I know.

"Denial of Service" attack.

Basically, an individual sends countinuous "hits" to a specific port, flooding the path and effectively shutting down the server.

Not much you can do as a defence, but depending on the quality of the firewall and the network Admin, you may be able to filter out the attack.

Thanks. Now I know what that means I don't need to look like a complete idiot whenever someone brings it up on a forum.

Isn't DoS - Denial of Service and DDoS - Distrubuted Denial of Service? Not sure if it is any different but some people tend to talk about it like they are..

You mean like you just did?

Andrew pretty much stated what a DDoS attack is. Ive been DoS'd a couple of times this year so far on my home IP and my servers. The only way to stop it is to have a good firewall... have some extra bandwidth and as soon as you notice an attack Nullroute the IP (take it offline) so you dont receive anymore packets and risk your server going down.

DoS attacks do take bandwidth too... so if you get dos'd hard enough for a while you can lose quite a bit of bw. My last dos attack to a server of mine used 74GB of bandwidth.

That's exactly what I mean.

Yeah Jonathan, if you don't catch the attack fast enough you can get in real troubles with bandwidth.

Sounds extremely irritating. One begins to wonder how long it's going to be until they completely flood the web.

No more DoS attacks on my server! Yea! I got Flood guard now that works at the router level. The second the router detects a lot of large packets going to my IP's it kills the remote IP and so on. This is new technology so I hear. Don't see many providers offering that yet.

I saw that advertised on a site somewhere, might have been server4u.
I remember it was an extra anyway.
Didnt read any info about it and havent really heard that much about it to be honest.
Sounds like it would be VERY useful to have if you have a server with a load of shared accounts on it, some which might attract attention from people who would do that...
I wish they were able to get caught a lot easier and it was taken more serious, I think that would have a better effect than having to pay to have something block them.

Most people doing DoS attacks dont get caught because they are triggering it from another computer and its hard to track it back to them

Yea, we moved to Server Matrix that is a sister to The Planet. The Flood Guard is extra but worth it!