Content delivery network service CloudFlare turns seven years old, and it's celebrating its birthday by offering customers free protection from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
The company calls this the 'Unmetered Mitigation'.
The idea is that customers shouldn't have to pay more to be protected. Regardless of what CloudFlare plan they use (Free, Pro, Business, or Enterprise), CloudFlare will no longer terminate customers, regardless of the size of the DDoS attacks they receive.
"We will never tell you to go away or that you need to pay us more because of the size of an attack," said CloudFlare.
However, CloufFlare's higher tier plans will continue to offer more sophisticated reporting, tools, and customer support to better tune protections against whatever threats customers may face online.
But what CloudFlare is highlighting in its seventh birthday, is that volumetric DDoS mitigation is officially unlimited and unmetered.
Previously, if users have their website hit by a DDoS attack, they have to figure out how to get their website online again. Not only that, they also have to deal with cost for the traffic that has been lost during the offline time.
CloudFlare's provides Unmetered mitigation of DDoS for layer 3 and 4 attacks (the more common protcol attacks) to all of its customers. Protection for layer 7 attacks are only available for the Pro plan and upward.
CloudFlare's decision to provide free mitigation from DDoS is certainly a good news for blogs and businesses that use its service.
Matthew Prince, CEO of the company said that, with the change and the potential for it to become an industry standard like free encryption, he hopes that DDoS attacks will soon be a thing of the past.
"If the rest of the industry moves away from the practice of surge pricing and builds DDoS mitigation in by default then it would largely end DDoS attacks for good. We took a step down that path today and hope, like with encryption, the rest of the industry will follow."
CloudFlare runs a large network, and according to Prince, the network has grown large enough to handle most DDoS attacks automatically.
"One of our key services is DDoS mitigation and we deflect a new DDoS attack aimed at our customers every three minutes. We do this with over 15 terabits per second of DDoS mitigation capacity."