Keeping Your Site Alive, our guide for keeping your site online amidst a DoS (denial of service) or DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, now  has a new look and new advice. The guide, originally created and updated in conjunction with the Tactical Technology Collective, is aimed at human rights defenders, independent publications, and other administrators of small websites.

DDoS attacks are a common phenomena, used by a variety of actors, designed to temporarily or indefinitely prevent a site from functioning efficiently. Such attacks have been aimed at activists, human rights defenders, and news publications, among others.

When we first launched Keeping Your Site Alive in 2011, the landscape of DDoS attacks was very different from now. DDoS attacks were more expensive to carry out—today, perpetrating a DDoS attack costs mere dollars. Fortunately, a number of services have arisen in the past six years that offer low- or no-cost DDoS protection for human rights defenders, such as Deflect and Cloudflare’s Project Galileo (for which EFF is a referring organization).

With this revamped guide, we aim to provide the knowledge, skills, and resources for smaller organizations and communities to potentially prevent the takedown of their platforms online or mitigate the effects of a successful DoS or DDoS attack. From choosing the appropriate hosting platform to backing up and mirroring your content, this guide provides the tools and strategies to Keep Your Site Alive. If you run a vulnerable website, or know others who do, pass the word — and the link — along.