Your online store is having its best sales day of the year. Then, without warning, the site slows to a crawl and stops responding altogether. No one hacked your database. No one stole a password. Someone simply sent more traffic than your servers could handle and that's enough to cost you the entire day.
This is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, one of the most common and disruptive threats businesses face today. At Datanet Hosting, we work with organizations that need infrastructure built to stay online no matter what's thrown at it. Here's how DDoS attacks work, and how Akamai keeps businesses running when attackers strike.
A DDoS attack floods a website, application, or network with overwhelming traffic from many sources at once, exhausting server resources until real users can't get through. Unlike a data breach, attackers aren't after your information they're after your uptime.
Think of a restaurant that seats 80 people, suddenly swarmed by 5,000 people crowding the doorway with no intention of ordering. Nothing was stolen, but real customers can't get in either that's a DDoS attack, in digital form.
Malicious traffic often comes from thousands of compromised devices worldwide, making it hard to spot especially with volumetric attacks (bandwidth floods), protocol attacks (exploiting network weaknesses), and application-layer attacks (mimicking real users to slip past basic defenses). Campaigns often combine all three, which is why single-layer defenses tend to fail.
Akamai stops attacks before they reach your infrastructure, using a globally distributed edge network and its dedicated scrubbing platform, Prolexic.
Akamai inspects traffic across thousands of points of presence worldwide, filtering malicious requests before they ever reach your origin servers. As an Akamai Cloud partner, we help businesses put this network to work on their own infrastructure.
Akamai's Prolexic platform offers over 20 Tbps of dedicated defense capacity enough that even record-setting volumetric attacks would use only a fraction of it. Traffic is diverted, cleaned in real time, and only legitimate requests reach your servers, backed by a zero-second mitigation SLA and 24/7 support from Akamai's Security Operations Command Center.
Businesses can run Prolexic as an always-on cloud service, deploy it on-premises for strict latency or data sovereignty needs, or use a hybrid setup protection tailored to how the business is actually built, not a generic template.
Because many attacks mimic real users, Akamai continuously analyzes traffic to flag anomalies in real time, catching sophisticated attacks while reducing false positives that block genuine customers.
Akamai integrates Web Application Firewall, bot management, and API protection into one unified platform, along with real-time dashboards showing attack size, source, and mitigation status so security teams stay informed, not blindsided.
Invest in dedicated DDoS mitigation rather than relying on standard firewalls alone.
Powerful security tools only protect you when they're configured correctly. At Datanet Hosting, we help businesses run a proper security assessment, choose the right mix of DDoS protection and enterprise hosting infrastructure, and deploy it without the guesswork.
DDoS attacks are only getting bigger and harder to distinguish from real traffic. Platforms like Akamai filter malicious requests before they become a problem, absorbing attacks at massive scale while legitimate users notice nothing at all. Pair that technology with the right hosting partner, and downtime stops being something you hope won't happen it becomes something your infrastructure is built to prevent.
Ready to strengthen your defenses? Talk to the Datanet Hosting team about building a hosting and security setup that keeps your business online, no matter what comes at it.
