Imperva DDoS Reviews

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Imperva DDoS

November 2024

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I’ve been using Incapsula CDN for about a month now, So I’d thought to write down a review about my experience. The loading time of a site is important, quite important. The loading time comes among various factors used for ranking a site, With site speed getting so much buzz around the town, your site/blog needs to be quick to be ranked high. The site loading time should be as minimum as possible, this not only makes your site loved by users and bots but also increases your conversion rates.

When decreasing your site load speed time, you have to look along several factors, the list of which includes things as easy as optimizing images to as complicated as combining CSS and JS files, the list includes several other things too. One thing which can make your life easier while optimizing your site for speed is to use a CDN ( Content Delivery Network ) It is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other Web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and a content delivery server. This decrease your site load time, and in addition to this most of the CDN’s provide you a one check option for minimizing HTML, CSS, JS etc.

I’ve now been with Incapsula CDN for about a month now, Before this I used Cloudflare for some time. But lets stick to Incapsula only. About Incapsula CDN : Like most of the CDNs around the web, this CDN is also paid. The good thing is it has a trial version, by deducting some of the features they allow you to use their CDN for Free. The premium account ( Of course paid, contains all the features ).

After you create an account, add your site and make the necessary changes, and log-in to your account. The very first page which would appear would be “My sites” page displaying your websites. Click on your site’s URL and tab with your traffic stats open up. The traffic stats displaying are different when compared to Google analytics or any other plugin. The tab like one displayed above will appear. The Real time traffic feature as displayed is for paid users only.

For unleashing the max speed, you need your content to be optimized. The large CSS and JS coding should be minimized and so is with the HTML too. Using a plugin for this purpose can be an option, but Incapsula provides an in-built option too. You just need to go to the settings > performance and check in the options like the snapshot in the left.

Before we continue, let me tell you my previous stats for an easy comparison. I have this blog hosted on a shared host with usual features offered. Initially my blog’s loading time was 5 sec ( Because I didn’t had much content ) but after using several themes, plugins and publishing some posts the margin increased to 11 sec, this was quite hurting, for readers as well as my rankings. So I decided to use a CDN, and the results after using the Incapsula CDN are :

After using the CDN, my gtmetrix report stats the following, the page speed grade being 93%, Yslow grade 85% and B in loading time. It is overall much convincing comparing the fact that they were quite below this margin before. I tested it on Gtmetrix three times and then thought to test it on pingdom tools. The test revealed that my site speed dropped down to 3 seconds from 11 seconds and 84/100 grade. So, this explains how useful is the Incapsula CDN if you care about the speed of your site/blog.

Final words : I was pretty much convinced by the Incapsula CDN, Overall it worked well without any glitches or breaking down the theme or stylesheet of my blog. I suggest the use of Incapsula’s CDN on your blog/site to decrease your site load time and increase your conversation rates.

So, how has your Incapsula experience been ?

In a nutshell this is what Incapsula does:

Incapsula offers state-of-the-art security and performance to websites of all sizes. Through a simple DNS change, your website’s traffic is seamlessly routed through Incapsula’s globally-distributed network of high-powered servers. Incoming traffic is intelligently profiled in real-time, blocking even the latest web threats: from sophisticated SQL injection attacks to scrapers, malicious bots, intruding comment spammers and thwarting multi-Gigabit DDoS attacks. Meanwhile, outgoing traffic is accelerated and optimized with Incapsula’s global CDN, for faster load times, keeping welcome visitors speeding through.

I’ve always been interested in how to make my website faster but with the news about brute force attacks on WordPress, I wanted a more secure website as well. Researching WordPress security, I was surprised to find the following image from Incapsula on what sort of traffic you actually get.

So I decided to try Incapsula to see what it could do for my website and try and show you through this Incapsula review, just what this product can do.

But what can Incapsula do against all of this? A much easier way of answering this would be to watch their promo video

By using this plugin you will have no change to your originating IPs when using Incapsula. Incapsula acts as a reverse proxy and all incoming connections to your website first pass through one of Incapsula’s servers. This plugin will ensure that you continue to see the real originating IP of your website visitors.

Once this is all setup, it’s just a waiting game for Incapsula to start collecting the data.

Inside Incapsula

Once the DNS changes have been made and Incapsula has had time to do its job, you’ll see an image like above when you log in. This is a 7 day run down of what has been going on with your website. As you can see my bot visits out-number the human visits by quite some way.

Not all bots are bad however, I need Google-bot in order for my website to be found as well you a large number of other good bots but Incapsula reports that in the last 7 days there’s been 158 bad bots on my website!

Incapsula security

To test the security of Incapsula, I deleted my Askimet plugin as Incapsula can handle comment bots and protect me from spam. I also let it run for 7 days to see what it would report. Here’s my 7 day run down of what happened on my website.

Going further into the Incapsula dashboard you get a run down of the top attacking countries with USA being my top one with 30% next is China with 20%.

Incapsula also gives you a run down of the types of threats to your website.

So it’s clear that bots are my biggest problem and Incapsula also shows what type of bot is causing the most problems, in my case it’s the comment spammer with 94%. I did want to test just how good Incapsula was so I deleted my Askimet plugin. Considering the amount of comment spammer bots visting my websites, Incapsula does a very good job of protecting my website. Although I still get a couple of spam comments a day without Askimet, I’m still impressed with Incapsula.

Incapsula will also email you when there’s a threat. This is an email I got yesterday when someone tried to login to my website. Incapsula blocked the request.

This image is also provided by incapsula showing the top client applications. It surprising just how many bots are out there on the Internet!

To get a better idea of bot vs humans, Incapsula provides you with the following image. This is a nice example of just how much of your bandwidth is being wasted with unwanted bots on your website.

Incapsula speed

Not only does Incapsula do a pretty god job of protecting your website but it also increases the speed of it. By blocking unwanted bots and saving your bandwidth, it not only saves you resources and money but you also get to use their CDN for a faster website.

So I wanted to test the speed of Incapsula, I switched to advanced performance and tested the before and after. The results are below.

Before advanced

After advanced

According to Pingdom switching to advanced performance on Incapsula increased the speed of my website by just over 50%!

You can also see the response time of the CDN location centers.

With the advanced setting of Incapsula it also caches dynamic cotent which you can read about here. There’s also a good article on how a CDN can help your SEO by Incapsula.

I’ve been impressed with Incapsula, it not only protects me from spammers and bad bots but it has also increased the speed of my website by over 50%. I found Incapsula very easy to use and once the setup is done everything is done automatically for you leaving you with a peace of mind of a faster website with better security.

To ensure the success of our online trading operations, we place a major emphasis on state-of-the-art security, high availability (99.9% uptime) and user convenience.

Daily high-volume network DDoS attacks against our website were wreaking havoc with business operations, resulting in downtime for our online trading platform. The anti-DDoS solutions we had in place was not equipped to mitigate these attacks, which came precisely at the time when we were experiencing record trading volumes.

Since our company deals with a highly competitive and time-sensitive trading market, high availability and stability are paramount to building our users' confidence in our platform. It was obvious to us that in order to maintain and grow our business, we needed the best DDoS protection solution.

We required a high-capacity solution capable of mitigating the largest Layer 3 DDoS attacks, which can often reach several tens of Gbps. Blackholing was not a desirable option, since this aggressive method for diverting traffic actually serves the attackers' goal of denying and disrupting service by not allowing any visitors to reach the site.

To ensure an optimal user experience, we sought a DDoS mitigation solution that would be transparent to users. In this context, we preferred a solution that does not use delay pages, which cause problems for the application's APIs and prevent users from connecting to the server.

In terms of architecture, we preferred a cloud-based solution for reasons of cost-effectiveness and compatibility with our existing cloud computing infrastructure.

Aware of the threat to our core business, we immediately began to look for a new anti-DDoS solution with the network capacity and security proficiency to meet our requirements. After an in-depth evaluation of leading DDoS Protection services in several industry comparisons and reviews, we chose Incapsula's cloud-based DDoS Protection service based on its ability to mitigate any type of DDoS attack with virtually zero business disruption.

We conducted an initial trial with Incapsula while still experiencing DDoS attacks of up to 100 Gbps. Incapsula mitigated these attacks, keeping the online trading platforms up at all times.

Our experience so far shows that Incapsula is a marked improvement over other DDoS protection companies we have worked with in the past. Despite the fact that attacks on our high-profile website are still a daily occurrence, traders coming to the site are able to buy and sell without any noticeable degradation in terms of performance and availability.

Through its non-intrusive traffic filtering and an enterprise-grade Web Application Firewall, Incapsula has been stable in protecting our online applications. The service secures websites and applications against all types of DDoS attacks, as well as sophisticated application attacks such as XSS and SQL injections.

Incapsula is now a key component of our security infrastructure. When under DDoS, traffic is routed through Incapsula for screening, where malicious traffic and DDOS attacks are blocked automatically.

By using Incapsula's DDoS Protection, we have achieved concrete benefits:

• Cloud-based mitigation of network DDoS attacks - Incapsula mitigates high-volume network attacks through a global network of multi-gigabyte scrubbing centers
• Intelligent mitigation of sophisticated application layer attacks - Incapsula uses advanced traffic analysis algorithms, granular mitigation rules and an enterprise-grade WAF to differentiate legitimate website visitors (humans, search engines, etc.) from automated or malicious clients.
• "Always on" DDoS protection - Automatic "always on" DDoS mitigation and 24x7 monitoring are effective in stopping "hit & run" DDoS attacks can wreak havoc with solutions that need to be manually turned on and off on every burst.
• Dedicated SoC team – An experienced team of Security Operations Center (SOC) engineers performs 24x7 security monitoring and assists with DDoS mitigation as needed.

Incapsula helped us stay up during some of the biggest DDoS attacks on record. This happened at a critical business juncture, when our increasing trading volumes were turning us into the number one bitcoin trading site in the world. We hope to continue working with Incapsula as we gain more exposure and popularity.

What is our primary use case?

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?