Sorry for the delay in my response.
I have been told the IP address is indeed the target of a DDoS attack. There is not a lot we can do except for wait for the attack to pass.
The only thing that can be done to stop the intermittent outages is to take down the IP address entirely, but that’s even worse than the current situation.
It’s very unlikely for a DDoS attack to cause physical damage to a server. Sure, computer hardware that runs at 100% utilization at all time has a shorter lifetime than a server that’s less loaded, but it’s not like your PC will catch on fire when you boot up a demanding video game.
In the past, when there were particularly big DDoS attacks, it would sometimes hit our network so hard it would just congest everything. A very big attack can not just overload the server being targeted, but also the routes and switches it’s connected to. That would then make not just that one server inoperable, but also all other servers connected to the same router/switch. So then it’s not one IP address that’s down, but all websites on our hosting.
We disable individual IP addresses when they are the target of the attack to contain the damage to just that IP.
I understand that that’s completely useless to you if your website is on the IP being attacked. But the next time our servers are attacked, you might not notice because then it’s another IP being blocked.
Suppose you have a 1 Gb/s internet connection at home, with a fancy router that can do DDoS filtering. You think you’re fully protected then, but when someone hits you with a 2 Gb/s attack, it will just fill up all your bandwidth with attack traffic, even if your router is filtering everything and preventing it from reaching your devices.
Similarly, if you have a 1 Gb/s internet connection, but your router’s processor is only fast enough to be able to filter 500 Mb/s of traffic, then you also won’t be able to reach the internet when you’re hit with a 800 Mb/s attack, because your router is too busy to handle your traffic along with the attack traffic.
This is the problem with the idea of “just block the attack”. You need to have both very high excess capacity in bandwidth and extremely powerful firewall devices to be able to block big attacks. And all of that is very expensive.
