Given the recent rise of security breaches and targeted attacks on website through the use of bot nets, it stands to reason that the interest in protecting assets against DDoS attacks has grown – and with good reason too.
However, a little research will reveal that there are various solutions that can be employed to protect valuable online assets that keep cash-cows going. Hardware solutions like Arbor devices work amazingly well, the down side is that they are often very expensive to purchase and maintain. Hybrid solutions such as those of Verisign are also excellent solutions simply because they combine the power of cloud computing with powerful hardware possibly offloading a lot of the administration work involved to the said company (Verisign). Keeping in mind that the latter are mostly enterprise solutions, there is a third option for smaller setups and that is CloudFlare.
CloudFlare offer to protect aand accelerate any online website. Once you switch over your DNS servers to CloudFlare, they optimise the delivery of your sites pages and block threats. In addition they limit abusive bots and crawlers effectively reducing spam and other attacks.
Setup takes less than 5 minutes and its platform independent as all you need to do is change your domains DNS settings. There are three levels you enable. The free version provides stats similar to google analytics about your visitors.
Moreover, the dashboard that you’re provided with also allows you to trust/block any websites that show up as posing a threat.
The other two levels are CloudFlare Pro and Enterprise (the latter is still works-in-progress). The advantage of signing up with them on the Pro plan allows for advanced security protection and virtually real-time stats. You also gain full control and insight into whats happening on your site. You can see the full plans here.
Bottom line, is that the free service does an excellent job of providing a threat control dashboard for basic security measures such as blocking of traffic by country or IP range and reputation-based threat protection. Five stars to CloudFlare!