This is a guest post written and contributed by CloudFlare.  CloudFlare makes it easy for any site to be as fast and secure as the Internet giants.

How CloudFlare increases speed and security of your site

CloudFlare, a web performance and security company, is excited to announce our partnership with Webtions! If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, our value proposition is simple: we’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats.

Today, hundreds of thousands of websites—ranging from individual blogs to e-commerce sites to the websites of Fortune 500 companies to national governments—use CloudFlare to make their sites faster and more secure. We power more than 65 billion monthly page views—more than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined—and over 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through our network.

Faster web performance

CloudFlare is designed to take a great hosting platform like Webtions and make it even better.

We run 23 data centers strategically located around the world. When you sign up for CloudFlare, we begin routing your traffic to the nearest data center.

As your traffic passes through the data centers, we intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before we check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.

CloudFlare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, CloudFlare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers. The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.

Broad web security

Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) we track on the Internet (see the chart below). As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites.

CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the CloudFlare community. We analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.

In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the CloudFlare network.

Signing up

Any website can deploy CloudFlare, regardless of your underlying platform. By integrating closely with Webtions, we make the process of setting up CloudFlare “1 click easy” through your existing Webtions cPanel dashboard. Just look for the CloudFlare icon, choose the domain you want to enable, and click the orange cloud. That’s it!

We’ve kept the price as low as possible and plans offered through Webtions are free. Moreover, we never charge you for bandwidth or storage, therefore saving you tons via reduced bandwidth costs.

For site owners who would like to take advantage of CloudFlare’s advanced offerings, we also offer a ‘Pro’ tier of service for $20/month. The ‘Pro’ tier includes all of the ‘Free’ tier’s offerings, as well as extra features like SSL, full web application firewall and faster analytics.

We’re proud that every day more than a thousand new sites, including some of the largest on the web, join the CloudFlare community. If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with Webtions, but the next step is to join the CloudFlare community.

Domain Registries keep updating the domain prices frequently based on market forces. Recently also they have sharply increased domain prices of gTLD domains (.com, .net, .org, .info, biz, etc.). On 14th, ICANN (the organization that manages the domain industry)  had announced price increase by $ 0.5 USD. In past whenever Domain registries increased price of the domain, we took a hit and did not change the domain price for you. But this time, a sharp increase in domain price has forced us to change the domain price for new domain purchase as well as for domain renewals.
Please note we are updating the prices of the domains as follows and will effect from 20th January 2012

We look forward to your continued support.

If you have any queries, please feel free to email us at hello@webtions.com

Due to client demands we have recently launched a new hosting package nicknamed “Professional Web Hosting Package” for those of who need more space and unlimited bandwidth for just Rs. 1,500/year.

Most companies in India do not have a backup policy. This is known only if the server crashes and clients lose their dynamic content such as database. Backups stored on same server whether on a partition or different drives is not useful when there is a total server crash. To offer our customers more peace of mind, we have set-up a new backup server with 2 times more capacity than our regular servers combined. This new server will ensure we have daily backup copies of your website stored on a totally different machine at the end of each day.

For next few weeks, we would only store 7 days of data. The data would be restored for all active customers on a on-demand basis for free.

We will continue to offer more value added services to our regular hosting platform without increasing our cost.

All cPanel Servers using the default Exim configuration are vulnerable. In order to update Exim with a fix please execute the command : /scripts/eximup.

References

• http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/SecurityLevels
• http://www.exim.org/lurker/message/20101207.215955.bb32d4f2.en.html