Page 37 - Payout Magazine Online Volume 10.01

MojoHost defies Big
Tech’s dominance
with MojoShield
by Brad Mitchell
MojoHost launched MojoShield shortly
before the European conventions in the
fall, and with that decision, we took on a billion-
dollar industry dominated by companies which
overcharge customers because they believe
those customers have no choice.
What MojoShield does is protect websites
by living between the Internet and the origin
server where the site is. This type of software
is called a Web Application Firewall or “WAF”
for short. As the name implies, it’s a firewall, but website. Instead of your website getting
a much more sophisticated firewall than most.
Studies have shown that nearly half of all
Internet traffic is computer bots. There are a lot
of bots that run around doing time-saving work
for humans like Google’s spider. To do those
tasks by hand would take an enormous amount
of time, and that’s why bots exist in the first
place. But, there are a lot of other bots running
around the Internet. Unlike self-identifying
bots (which tell you they are a computer, not
a human), the majority of bots do not identify
themselves as such. They ultimately want you
to believe they are human. These types of
bots are responsible for all kinds of malicious
activity from cyberattacks, SPAM botting, and
click fraud. Because financial gain drives most
bot activity, that is the root reason it continues
to grow and grow.
For example, one simple cyber-attack is
spamming comment threads. These bots want
you to read their comments and click their links.
Further, some bots try to find vulnerabilities in
known scripts (like WordPress) or custom-
coded software with security holes. Once a
vulnerability is detected, bot scripts will attempt
to “brute force” their way into the website
back-end or databases. From there, they can
breach sensitive data, distribute malware or
viruses, or worse. MojoShield detects this type
of injection activity and shut it down before it
costs you time, reputation, and money.
Website owners will find MojoShield a
great way to mitigate Denial of Service attacks
(DDOS), and the technology works because it
protects your origin servers. When an attack
occurs, the technology spreads high volumes
of website requests to alternative endpoints,
instead of at your origin servers. Mitigation
like this reduces the level of requests to your
bogged down and going offline (and losing
visitors and money), the result is an ineffective model that proves we are seeking to be a more
attack that cannot threaten your web site
uptime.
During this event is where most competing
services would charge you based on the
gigabytes (or terabytes) of bandwidth caused
by the DDOS. However, the MojoShield
solution does not bill based on bandwidth, and
MojoHost instead opted to bill on the number
of requests.
A couple of years ago, one of our clients
was handling his DDOS mitigation through one
of our competitors operated by a technology
conglomerate in California. Instead of being
always-on like MojoShield, their solution was
“always-off” and required a manual decision
whether or not to mitigate an attack only after
it was detected. On top of the hefty $2,000
monthly service charge, they would then be
charged $6,000 to mitigate each attack. So,
the more that the client would get attacked,
the more money the DDOS mitigation company
would make. The client told me that the
decision to mitigate the attacks came down to
how profitable they had been that month and
whether or not they could afford it.
At MojoHost, that’s something we call “bad
mojo.”
Website publishers and business owners
do not need to decide whether to mitigate
attacks. We should all be striving to reduce
the incidence of bad bots and malicious
attacks on the Internet. It does not make sense
for companies to be incentivizing attacks.
Companies should be measuring success
through how many attacks are avoided rather
than how many are sustained. That’s why we
aligned our MojoShield offering with the needs
of our clients. Our goal is for fewer attacks (not
more), and our always-on solution has a pricing
proactive provider of website security.
Huge savings are to be had with MojoShield
in part because our WAF technology billing is
on the number of requests, not bandwidth. Due
to this, content-rich websites are protected
at superior savings to competitors such as
Cloudflare. The basic MojoShield plan includes
up to 10 million requests per month for just $10
per domain.
Who can’t afford $10 a month for their
website to be more secure?
If you think about it, that $10 investment
saves you money. Less malicious or bot web
requests reaching your origin servers means
that fewer server resources are required to
maintain a website, and that means faster load
times. Custom security, access restrictions,
and protection rules can be applied. Custom
code can also be applied and executed before
the request reaches your server or web site,
opening up a wide range of possibilities.
PAYOUTMAGAZINE 37