Christmas.com

Keeping Christmas secure, fast, and online.

You may find it hard to believe, but there are people out there who dislike Christmas: virtual Grinches trying to ruin the fun for the rest of us.

Christmas.com, a beacon of holiday cheer online, encountered one of these cyber Grinches this December, their busiest time of year. Christmas.com is a site dedicated to the vision that “Christmas is for Sharing”: it allows people to connect and share through photos, wish lists, games, recipes and free Family Pages wherever they are in the world. There’s even a high tech Naughty List that allows you to see if you’ve been good this year. While the domain name Christmas.com is well trusted and serves tons of happy visitors, it’s also a target.

In early December, Christmas.com got hit with several large DDoS attacks, knocking the site offline. Alan Bailward, the lead technologist on the team, said “We were getting hammered and couldn’t keep the site online. We needed to get behind a proxy to shield us from the attacks.”

Having heard about Cloudflare from a friend in the IT business, Alan contacted Cloudflare. “Getting setup on Cloudflare was fantastically easy, it took only a few minutes”, Alan remarked, “ and as a systems administrator, knowing that someone is there to take the brunt of these attacks lets me relax. It’s one less thing I have to worry about.” Once Christmas.com was behind Cloudflare the attacks stopped immediatly.

Christmas.com experienced 12x increase in traffic during the latest DDoS attack. Cloudflare successfully absorbed the traffic at the edge and kept Christmas.com online.

Cloudflare is the leader in DDoS mitigation, but its service extends far beyond. Alan said, “Cloudflare is also great because they have a worldwide presence. Christmas is a global holiday, and Cloudflare’s CDN makes sure our site is safe and fast for our customers all over the world.”

We hope the holiday season goes as smoothly for you as it will for Christmas.com. Check out their site to find new ways of connecting with your family.