• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Sucuri Blog

Website Security News

  • Products
    • Website Security Platform
    • Website Firewall (WAF)
    • Enterprise Website Security
    • Multisite Solutions
  • Features
    • Detection
    • Protection
    • Performance
    • Response
    • Backups
  • Partners
    • Agency Solutions
    • Partners
    • Referral Program
    • Ecommerce
  • Resources
    • Guides
    • Webinars
    • Infographics
    • SiteCheck
    • Reports
    • Email Courses
  • Immediate Help
  • Login
Caching Options and DDoS Attacks

How to Improve Website Resilience for DDoS Attacks – Part II – Caching

August 9, 2018Northon TorgaEspanol

FacebookTwitterSubscribe

In the first post of this series, we talked about the practices that will optimize your site and increase your website’s resilience to DDoS attacks. Today, we are going to focus on caching best practices that can reduce the chances of a DDoS attack bringing down your site.

Website caching is a technique to store content in a ready-to-go state without the need (or with less) code processing. When a CDN is in place, cache stores the content in a server location closer to the visitor. It’s basically a point-in-time photograph of the content.

Caching

When a website is accessed, the server usually needs to compile the website code, display the end result to the visitor, and provide the visitor with all the website’s assets. This all takes a toll on your server resources, slowing down the total page load time. To avoid this overhead, it’s necessary to leverage certain types of caching whenever possible.

Caching not only will decrease load time indications, such as time to first byte (TTFB), it also saves your server resources.

Types of Caching

There are all sorts of caching types and strategies, but we won’t cover them all. In this article, we’ll approach three that we see most in practice.

Static Files

The first type is the simplest one, called static files caching.

Images, videos, CSS, JavaScript, and fonts should always be served from a content delivery network (CDN). These network providers operate thousands of servers, spread out across global data centers. This means they can deliver more data much faster than your server ever could on its own.

When using a CDN, the chances of your server suffering from bandwidth exhaustion attacks are minimal.

Your website will also be much faster given the fact that a large portion of website content is composed of static files, and they would be served by the CDN.

Page Caching

This is definitely the most powerful type of cache. The page caching will convert your dynamic website into HTML pages when possible, making the website a lot faster and decreasing the server resource usage.

A while ago, I wrote an article about Testing the Impacts of Website Caching Tools.

In that article, with the help of a simple caching plugin, the web server was able to provide 4 times more requests using ¼ of the server resources when compared to the test without the caching plugin.

However, as you may know not every page is “cacheable”. This leads us to the next type…

In-Memory Caching

By using a software such as Redis or Memcached, your website will be able to retrieve part of your database information straight from the server memory.

Using in-memory caching improves the response time of SQL queries. It also decreases the volume of read and write operations on the web server disk.

All kinds of websites should be able to leverage in-memory caching, but not every hosting provider supports it. Make sure your hosting does before trying to use such technology.

Conclusion

We highly recommend you to use caching wisely in order to spare your server bandwidth and to make your website work faster and better.

Our Website Application Firewall (WAF) provides a variety of caching options that can suit your website needs. It also works as a CDN, improving your website performance. Not only do we protect your website from DDoS attacks, but we also make it up to 70% faster with our WAF.

We are still planning to cover other best practices about how to improve website resilience for DDoS attacks in other posts. Subscribe to our email feed and don’t miss our educational content based on research from our website security team.

FacebookTwitterSubscribe

Categories: Security Advisory, Security Education, Website SecurityTags: Best Practices, Sucuri Firewall

About Northon Torga

Northon Torga is Sucuri's Security Analyst who joined the company in 2016. Northon's main responsibilities include working on malware cleanup software, the automation robot, supporting Sucuri Labs and Docs, and more. His professional experience covers 13 years in servers and cybersecurity. When Northon isn't developing software or blog posting, you might find him discussing sci-fi topics on Facebook groups or studying physics. Connect with him on LinkedIn or on his personal website.

Reader Interactions

Primary Sidebar

Socialize With Sucuri

We're actively engaged across multiple platforms. Follow us and let's connect!

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • RSS Feed

Join Over 20,000 Subscribers!

Footer

Products

  • Website Firewall
  • Website AntiVirus
  • Website Backups
  • WordPress Security
  • Enterprise Services

Solutions

  • DDos Protection
  • Malware Detection
  • Malware Removal
  • Malware Prevention
  • Blacklist Removal

Support

  • Blog
  • Knowledge Base
  • SiteCheck
  • Research Labs
  • FAQ

Company

  • About
  • Media
  • Events
  • Employment
  • Contact
  • Testimonials
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram

Customer Login

Sucuri Home

  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Frequently Asked Questions

© 2022 Sucuri Inc. All rights reserved

Sucuri Cookie Policy
See our policy>>

Our website uses cookies, which help us to improve our site and enables us to deliver the best possible service and customer experience.