Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services, has provided 1ink.com with DDoS mitigation service to protect its network of e-Commerce sites.

1ink.com is an online retailer of high-quality replacement inkjet and laser toner cartridges.

The 1ink.com network was hit with the first of three DDoS distributed denial of service attacks that grew in size and complexity. The first DDoS attack brought down www.101inks.com, one of the smaller 1ink.com e-Commerce sites, for more than a day. During that time, they routed traffic from 101inks.com to their other domains in an attempt to mitigate the attack.

To stop the DDoS attack, Roland Davoudikia, 1ink.com CEO, selected Prolexic from among several DDoS mitigation services he had researched. Prolexic mitigated the attack within five minutes.

Stuart Scholly, president of Prolexic, said: "We concluded from our post-attack forensic analysis that it is likely the 1ink.com websites were mistakenly targeted.

"This illustrates that even random events can have significant financial impact on a business if some level of DDoS mitigation is not in place."

Later in the year, the company’s main e-Commerce site at www.1ink.com was hit with another attack – a combination SYN and DNS flood that peaked at 70 Gbps. As expected, this denial of service attack did not bring down the site, because Prolexic’s PLXproxy DDoS protection service was already in place. Five days later, the DDoS attackers struck again, and once again Prolexic was able to quickly detect and mitigate the attack without any action from 1ink.com.

Davoudikia said: "Having Prolexic’s DDoS mitigation service is like having insurance against DDoS attacks, and as a result, these last two attacks did not have any effect on our business.

"There was the potential to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in online sales each day, along with collateral damage to our partner relationships. Fortunately, none of that happened. I can’t imagine running my business without DDoS attack protection from Prolexic."