DDoS Protection using CloudFlare

The article describes how you can use CloudFlare to defend the website against DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks.

What is DDoS Protection by Cloudflare?

DDoS attacks are becoming very common. In such type of attacks, multiple computers flood a target site with so much network traffic that it responds very slowly or not at all.

The dispersed and redundant network of Cloudflare reduces the load brought on by DDoS assaults. You may enable extra precautions from Cloudflare, such as the “I’m under attack” option, in addition to DDoS protection. When an active assault is underway against your website, you may quickly enable this security measure. The option offers further security to prevent potentially harmful HTTP traffic from accessing your site when it is activated. When Cloudflare runs the check browser, authorized visitors will view the following page for around five to six seconds:

Once Cloudflare completes the checking process, your site gets loaded normally.

To add an additional protection layer to your website, along with “I’m under attack” mode, you can also whitelist specific IP addresses.

# Steps to enable “I’m under attack” mode in Cloudflare :

1. Log in to cPanel account.

2. Locate SOFTWARE section on the cPanel home screen, and click on Cloudflare.

3. Click on Enable “I’m Under Attack” Mode:

4. If you want to disable it, then click on Disable “I’m Under Attack” Mode:

# Steps to Whitelist IP address :

To protect your site from the malicious IP addresses, you can grant access to only specific IP addresses that you trust. This process is known as “whitelisting”, that provides an extra protection layer to your site.

Perform the following steps to do so :

1. By using the cPanel File Manager or the SSH command prompt, open the /home/username/public_html/.htaccess file in your preferred text editor, where username will represent your account username.

2. Copy and paste the following text into the htaccess file :

order deny, allow
deny from all

3. Go tohttps://www.cloudflare.com/ips-v4. Copy and paste the entire list of IP addresses into the .htaccess file immediately after the deny from all line. Make sure that each IP address should be on a separate line.

4. Now add the following command at the start of each line that contains an IP address :

allow from

5. Use the allow from IP_address format to add the additional IP address (like your office or home IP address) to the whitelist.

6. You will now have the .htaccess file that will contain the following content :

order deny, allow
deny from all
allow from 103.21.244.0/22
[Additional Cloudflare IP addresses to allow]
[Any other IP addresses you want to allow]

Save the changes to the .htaccess file. Whitelisting will now be enabled.

That’s it!

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