Every website sometimes makes enemies -- so it's possible that your community news/info site may become the target of an attack that could take it offline. Here are a couple of free tools to help protect your site from denial of service attacks.

A distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack is any effort to interrupt or suspend a website's hosting by forcing a web server not to respond to any requests because it's flooded with too many requests. This can take many forms. And while most people hear about DDOS attacks against high-profile sites, it can happen to any website. All it takes is one person with the appropriate skills and sufficient motivation to knock your site offline. You probably won't lose data or content from this kind of attack, but it will take time and effort to get back online.

Here are two free tools recommended by hyperlocal publishers:

• CloudFlare. Recommended by Dylan Smith, editor and publisher of the Tucson Sentinel, who notes: "It's more of a content delivery network than an anti-DDOS system, but it effectively blocks denial of service attacks as well. We had a serious of heavy DDOS attacks a year ago, but since we installed CloudFlare, that's kept things at bay. It's important to run through the CloudFlare logs at least every couple days, to block IP (internet protocal) addresses that are behaving suspiciously. We're using the free plan, which suits us just fine. It's saving us about 50-60% of the bandwidth on our server." (Other plans start at $20/month.)
• DDoS Deflate. This is a customizeable Unix script that you (or your system administrator) can implement on your web server. When any IP addresses exceed the number of connections that you specify, they automatically get blocked by your server's firewall. A bit more context for the geekily inclined: Pascale Fusselholder (editor of YubaNet, which uses DDOS Deflate) notes that this tool "works great, including with load balancing. We experience exponential traffic during fires, but Deflate keeps the servers mostly free of script kiddies. A few tweaks to our Apache web server configuration also are helpful: mod_evasive helps both for DDoS and brute force. Of course, keeping Apache up to date and applying security patches to your OS (if you run a dedicated server) are a must."

DDOS attacks against community sites may not be common, but they do happen. If implementing these or similar tools is easy and free/cheap for your site, they might give you some piece of mind.