M3Server Technical Blog FAQ M3CDN and Firewall FAQ

M3CDN and Firewall FAQ



> Can you explain how the bandwidth is used less? Also how speed is increased?

Those are very good questions, we will improve our web site for illustrating these answers. We thank you for the questions!

Your server will use less bandwidth since the CDN will cache content and serve it from the cloud VS your server. This also increases your web site speed in two ways. First, cached content is served quicker by the very fast caching engine VS your web server. Secondly, by reducing the connection load on your server, your site is served faster by the much relieved server load. Your server doesn’t have to handle serving all that cached content.

The firewall is just as important. By detecting and protecting your server from brute force login attacks, we can prevent 90% of server crashes. When these attacks come in, if they don’t crash your server, they dramatically increase your server’s work load. Here is a common flow chart of a web site attack based on an attacker trying to gain access to your login area:

WITHOUT FIREWALL

incoming request:
intruder > login page get request > login user/pass post request > apache > php > mysql > mysql reports bad login credentials

returned answer request:
intruder < invalid login response < apache < php < mysql > returned invalid login

Repeat the above scenario 10 to 1000s times per min and you can quickly understand how elevated the load can become.

WITH FIREWALL SERVICE

incoming request:
intruder > login page get request > login user/pass post request > #FIREWALL# > apache > php > mysql > mysql reports bad login credentials

returned answer request:
intruder < invalid login response < #FIREWALL# < apache < php < mysql > returned invalid login

After a threshold of failures is reached, the flow changes:

FIREWALL BLOCKING REQUST:

incoming request:
intruder > login page get request > login user/pass post request > #FIREWALL# BLOCKED

Intruder doesn’t get any response, just like the response he would receive from a downed server. The attack is throttled to just a few attempts per minute.

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