ddos attacks and how to reduce the impact!

I've looked around the web and i've come to the conclusion that even though you can't fully protect against the ddos attacks against servers, there are ways to reduce the impact so that the servers will stay online even when under ddos.

I'm not really that good in pc's and programming so i need someone who can explain real simple and even though i dont really know about that stuff i consider myself a fast learner:P

Hence my question, can someone please explain to me what i can do to reduce the ddos attacks to a bearable size?
And i dont mean buying hardware firewalls for huge amounts of money because the server is for fun not for making money and i dont really have that much.
I would be really really happy for your reply's and if there is a reply with suggestions that would decrease the server downtime coz of the ddos im sure i could come up with a reasonable amount of payment for his/her time.

Thanks again.

I don't think you can really safe yourself except using a hardware fw or protection.

Quote:

Originally Posted by xXMagicalXx I don't think you can really safe yourself except using a hardware fw or protection.

Im sure there are ways to reduce the ddos because atm, server is offline like 10h a day coz of the ddos attacks. That is not normal .)

You're never safe from a DDos attack even with a hardware firewall/DDos protection. These do reduce it's impact but can't prevent big DDos attacks.

You could try to block them with a software firewall but I doubt that it's going to work. Only solution wait till it stops.