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In case you are unable to fix issues yourself or through your system administrator, e.g. by troubleshooting server errors, your next course of action would be to contact your hosting provider.  However, depending on whether your server is located in your country or abroad, your experience with the hosting provider may differ. 

Even though foreign hosting providers may provide a better service than those in your country, you should also be aware that their support might not be up to the standards in resolving the issue with your website quickly. 

Hosting providers with 24/7 support are the best option nonetheless, as well as those who provide additional support channels (live chat, call) in addition to opening a support ticket or sending an email.

Activate DDoS protection

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks , which aim to “flood” the server with a large number of automated access requests, usually coming from thousands of IP addresses  , in order to make the site unavailable. To prevent your site from being disabled due to a DDoS attack, you should activate DDoS protection. 

The most common DDoS protection service provider is Cloudflare, which offers free plans but with limited options, but there are others such as Deflect, whose services are used by many media, environmental and human rights organisations. Google also offers free DDoS protection through Project Shield, which is intended for news, human rights and election monitoring sites. 

Error Server Site Hosting

To determine the potential source of issues with your website, taking a look at server logs  can be of great importance. Server logs are text documents which provide you with various information about all activities on the server. For example, you can see the IP addresses [IP-ADDRESS] and identity of the devices making a request to the server , time and date of the request, etc, which can all be crucial when mitigating a cyber incident.

You can request server logs for a certain time frame from your system administrator or through technical support.  

File a criminal complaint

Once you have the log files from your server from which it could be seen that your website was targeted with a cyber incident, e.g. unauthorised access, you can file a criminal complaint to the police or competent prosecutor. 

When preparing a complaint, make sure you mapped and described the events during the incident as they happened (what behaviour with the site did you notice, at what time, were there any changes you weren’t aware of), prepared the server logs and other useful information, such as screenshots  of suspicious activities. 

Error Server Digital evidence Site IP Address Hosting