Jimdo

Jimdo simplifies, consolidates, and secures its services with Cloudflare

Founded by three school friends in 2007 in northern Germany, today Jimdo is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, with over 250 employees. The company’s mission is to enable self-employed small business owners to thrive online. Jimdo started as a website builder and has helped businesses create over 32 million websites over the years. Now Jimdo offers an online store, logo creator, legal text generator, business listings, social media integration, SEO, and more for small businesses.

Facing a growing DDoS threat with help from Cloudflare

As is the case for any online business, Jimdo faced regular distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. For many years they had internally developed, partially manual systems in place to block those attacks. "Jimdo had a history of always focusing on homegrown solutions," says Felipe Furlan, Chief Technology Officer at Jimdo, "The detection and protection layers that we had were all implemented in-house.”

"We always had to figure out how to stop DDoS attacks that came through our defenses ourselves. We had to understand what strategy the threat actor was using and how they were bypassing our mechanisms, before we could deploy a fix and mitigate the attack."

But as DDoS attacks began to increase in volume and sophistication — a global trend — Jimdo realized that they needed outside help. "At one point, we had a very intense DDoS attack,” says Furlan. “Every three hours, we were out for 15 minutes. We would deploy another defense mechanism, but then we would be out again. Our own solutions were not able to stop the level of attack that was coming through."

Jimdo turned to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare was almost immediately able to automatically mitigate the attacks they were facing. All subsequent attacks have been mitigated by Cloudflare as well. Manual effort is no longer required to identify attackers and block attacks.

"I don't have concerns about attacks anymore," says Furlan. "I'm not getting woken up in the night because a DDoS attack started.

"Every single staff meeting, we used to have the amount of threats blocked on the agenda. For a while now this hasn't been on our agenda anymore because it's not relevant. We know it's all being done in the background."

Automatic and unmetered DDoS mitigation from Cloudflare helps Jimdo save on infrastructure costs as well. "The traffic cost used to increase when we had a massive attack — that doesn't happen anymore," says Furlan.

Gaining efficiency and reducing manual effort

Starting from application security services like DDoS protection, Jimdo began adopting additional Cloudflare services. For a business like Jimdo, which supports millions of websites and serves users all over the globe, using Cloudflare SSL for SaaS plus the Cloudflare network for web delivery and certificate management was a natural move.

Managing SSL certificates for the many websites published via Jimdo used to be a highly manual process. Now, Furlan says, "We don't need to issue the certificate ourselves and then upload it somewhere. I can do everything with Cloudflare — it's one single entry point, and then it's done."

Relying on Cloudflare for SSL certificate management and content delivery has resulted in massive cost savings and efficiency improvements. "We're saving hundreds of thousands of euros a year with Cloudflare," says Furlan. "I had a five-person team taking care of web delivery and now this team can spend their time on other things because everything is done by Cloudflare. My team can really focus on the core of our mission: develop solutions to help small businesses."

Providing developers with a simple, smooth experience with Cloudflare Workers

After adopting Cloudflare application services, Jimdo also began building on the Cloudflare Developer Platform with Workers.

One of the biggest infrastructure projects they tackled with Cloudflare Workers was building a way to serve content correctly to users based on their global location. Jimdo has different plans and features available in different regions around the globe. In the Jimdo tradition, Furlan says, "We had a homegrown solution, our own user location service: hundreds of lines of code and very complex databases to identify the IP range."

But with the switch to Workers, "Hundreds of lines of code became just three lines of code," says Furlan. "And it's easy to maintain. The developer experience is super smooth. The platform is very intuitive, it's easy to deploy, and it saved us a lot of lines of code in this case."

Moving forward with Cloudflare

Today, Jimdo is continuing to explore more use cases on the Cloudflare development platform, including AI deployments and a possible migration from Amazon S3 to Cloudflare R2 object storage.

Jimdo is reaping the benefits of consolidating multiple services. "With Cloudflare, I can have the benefit of working with a single vendor that has a good vision and strategy for moving forward,” says Furlan. “Ultimately, working with Cloudflare enables us to stay focused on our core business, which is delivering critical services that support millions of websites.”