To the Rescue: LiteSpeed’s Free Anti-DDoS Service is Back!

After taking a couple months to retool, we’re bringing back our ever-popular, FREE anti-DDoS proxy service.

Since Version 1.0, LiteSpeed Web Server has featured bandwidth and connection throttling as well as small memory footprint. These features alone can defeat weak DDoS attacks, and many anti-DDoS providers use LSWS as part of their stack. Over the years, though, customers have been coming to us with their DDoS problems and we have informally tried to provide assistance. For the past year, we’ve been taking that real-world experience and officially offering free anti-DDoS proxy service. We use specially-built intelligent logic to rapidly and accurately detect botnets of various natures — from HTTP to SYN floods — and filter them out. Occasionally, we’ve pulled the service offline to give it a once-over and upgrade, and each time it’s come back stronger than ever. Now it’s back again.

Here’s how the service works:

1. You get attacked. (Actually, if you like to be extra-careful, you can make an account right now and have the proxy standing by.)
2. You go to the anti-DDoS page and “order” an account. (Use your real name and address when making the account, because, well, fraud is illegal.)
3. You get an email confirmation with detailed steps on how to configure your account.
4. You configure your account and click “Submit.”
5. Your account status changes from “Pending,” to “Initialized,” to “Active.” (This make take a few minutes.)
6. You use a CNAME entry to point your DNS record to the sub-domain we’ve assigned you.
7. You sit back while we slice and dice the bots.

(For returning users of our anti-DDoS service, your accounts are still active. Since we’ve switched from assigning users IPs to assigning a sub-domain, you will need to log on to see your assigned sub-domain.)

You’ll notice that none of these steps involve paying any invoices or anything like that. That’s because the service is absolutely free. Someday, we may charge money for it — and we reserve the right to say, “Sorry, but we can’t handle that for free.” — right now, though, we’re saying, “Point us at your bots. We want to get our hands dirty.”