REDWOOD SHORES, CA--(Marketwire - May 15, 2012) - Incapsula, a cloud-based website security and performance service, today announced new research that reveals that for websites with less than 2,500 monthly visitors, more than 83 percent of traffic is non-human and 49 percent poses serious security threats to small businesses. This research follows a recent Incapsula [ report ] that found 31 percent of website traffic is malicious to sites with 50,000 to 100,000 monthly visitors.

"When analyzing smaller websites, it is clear that the automated, non-human traffic is significantly higher as a percentage of overall Web visitors than for medium to larger sites and this can have massive performance and security impact," says Marc, Gaffan Co-Founder, Incapsula. "Most small businesses rely on web hosting companies that sell fixed-cost shared hosting services with unlimited plans. However, the more websites the hosting provider adds to the server -- in an attempt to increase overall utilization and drive more revenue -- the more the server's utilization decreases due to the increase in Bot traffic."

Key Findings Include:

• Small website owners' page load times are increased by more than 50 percent;
• [ 25 percent-50 percent of website visitors abandon ] a site when load times exceed 4 seconds;
• [ SEO ranking are affected ] negatively;
• Shared hosting providers can lose over 50 percent of their server capacity to automated Bot traffic.

Online Resources:

• Get started with [ Incapsula ] today
• Read the Incapsula [ Blog ] for more on today's announcement
• Follow Incapsula on [ Twitter ]

About Incapsula:
Incapsula is a cloud-based website security and performance service, and a PCI certified cloud web application firewall and content delivery network for small and medium-sized businesses. With a simple DNS switch, Incapsula provides protection and improves the performance of websites without changing the site or installing any hardware/software. Incapsula goal is to provide peace of mind for website owners that their websites have protection against attacks, that their customers' information is safeguarded while their web pages are delivered at a high speed. Incapsula is a majority-owned subsidiary of Imperva (NYSE: [ IMPV ]), a leading provider of data security solutions. Website: [ www.incapsula.com ]

*NOTE: Incapsula collected the data from an anonymous sample of 1,000 customers.