Difficult economic times have led to a huge number of people moving from paid employment to self-employment. Many of these people are building digital businesses that rely on a website to either directly sell their offering, or to tell the world their offering exists. This move has led to a rise in the number of vendors offering quick and simple tools to aid small and mid sized businesses getting online.
With this move comes a need for many services that were formerly enterprise-level offerings to come down to the SMB market. Case in point is website security and performance. Recent times have seen the rise of a number of providers that offer these sorts of services at a simple monthly cost (or often times, in a bid to gain eyeballs, for free).
Today it’s the turn of Incapsula, a cloud-based website security and performance service, to announce this sort of service. Incapsula is a spin out of Imperva, a more enterprise focused data security company. Incapsula is launching a SMB focused offering to deliver both site performance, as well as protection from botnet attacks and comment spammers.
Like other similar services (CloudFlare for example) Incapsula works via a DNS switch that send traffic through their servers. Incapsula Personal’s features include:
- Anti bot protection
- Support for SSL websites
- Advanced website performance and server load reduction
- Real-time traffic statistics and performance analytics
- Dedicated support
Incapsula has a number of different plans. The free product offers basic security and a global CDN and the new personal plan costs $9/month and adds dynamic caching, SSL and higher bandwidth allowances (500GB/month rather than 50GB/month). The existing business plan drops in a web application firewall for a princely $59/month
The personal plan undercuts CloudFlare’s Pro offering by over half – it will be interesting to see just how low this sort of service can go in terms of price.