One of our clients is launching a new site and I've been tasked with making a short overview of the advantages/disadvantages of Akamai, Incapsula or other CDN providers who are strong with DDoS protection.
Our main concerns are CDN Caching, bandwidth costs and DDoS protection.
The site operates on a heavily customized Joomla core and will be used for distribution of e-content (mostly images, mostly ~500KB). At launch we do not plan to use it for any kind of direct sales, but we may have a premium subscription down the road.
A previous project we did with the same client was crippled by DDoS attacks, so effective DDoS protection is a must.
I would be grateful to hear your experiences and suggestions.
PS - Cloudflare is not an option.
EDIT:
First, let me say I am not the most technical person on our team. What I do know is that the client's previous website was brought down by repeated DDoS attacks. The COO tells me that it was an HTTP flood on an Ajax object and that the attackers bypassed cookie challenges. I also know that at the time we were offered the option to manually block malicious IP's, which wasn't good enough.
So speaking of challenges . . . my task is to find an alternative for the new site that will be tested by the team.
We were looking at Akamai and I found out about Incapsula because they blocked a similar attack. http://www.incapsula.com/blog/world-largest-site-xss-ddos-zombies.html
Both CDNs are probably good enough, but I would be very grateful to hear from someone with hands-on experience. Most importantly I need to know about DDoS protection, preferably based on actual real world experience.
