Website Protection: Common Problems and Solutions

Here are the issues that most often come up after enabling website protection, and how to solve them.

Error 504

Problem. When you open the protected site, error 504 appears (in rare cases, error 502).

Solution. This error is usually caused by misconfigured rules for incoming connections (the firewall) on the web server. Check your firewall settings with “Website Protection: Firewall Settings”.

Mail and FTP do not work

Problem. After enabling protection, mail and ftp stopped working.

Solution. Website protection works as a reverse proxy: the DDoS-Guard proxy server handles only requests to ports 80/tcp and 443/tcp, while FTP uses ports 20/tcp and 21/tcp. The best solution is to delete the DNS record for FTP and connect to the server directly by its IP address.

For receiving and sending mail, we recommend a separate server that does not host the site.

A compromise is to add an extra IP address for mail on the same server. In that case, make sure that mail is not only received but also sent from the new IP address.