"Getting attacked" is one of every site owner's biggest fears — a DDoS can knock a normal VPS offline instantly. This guide explains what DDoS is, what happens to a normal VPS, and whether you should pay for high-defense.
1. What DDoS Is
A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) uses a huge botnet to flood your IP with traffic or requests at once, saturating bandwidth or the service so real users can't get through. Attacks are often measured in Gbps.
2. What Happens to a Normal VPS
- To protect other customers, the datacenter usually triggers a "black hole" (null route) on the attacked IP — discarding all its traffic for a while (tens of minutes to hours), during which your site is fully unreachable.
- So a normal VPS's "resistance" is really just the datacenter's black-hole threshold, not true protection.
3. How High-Defense VPS Works
- Traffic scrubbing: traffic is first routed to a scrubbing center that identifies and drops attack traffic, passing clean traffic to the origin.
- Protection ceiling: high-defense plans advertise "defends X Gbps"; beyond the ceiling, black-holing can still occur.
- The trade-offs are higher cost and slightly more latency (traffic detours through scrubbing).
4. Should You Buy High-Defense
- An ordinary blog / company site is rarely targeted → no need for high-defense, save the money.
- Gaming, finance, competitive niches, or sites attacked before → consider high-defense.
- Budget alternative: front a website with Cloudflare (hides the origin IP + free basic protection), which blocks a lot of CC and small-to-mid attacks — enough for most small sites.
Not sure if you need high-defense? Describe your workload to SharkCloud support on Telegram @aliyun370 for an assessment.