For a nationwide furniture retailer, slow website speeds mean lost customers and lost revenue. Massoud Furniture was struggling with a sluggish site—hosted on an underpowered shared server—causing frustrated customers and declining sales. We stepped in, moving them to an enterprise WordPress hosting solution, implementing a CDN, optimizing their massive image library, and fine-tuning every aspect of performance.Then, on President’s Day Weekend—their biggest sales event of the year—a massive DDoS attack threatened to bring the site down. Thanks to real-time monitoring and fast action, we kept their website online, secured their revenue, and proved that having the right hosting partner makes all the difference.
Summary
The Problem: A Sluggish Website Was Costing Sales
Massoud Furniture is a nationwide luxury furniture brand, offering handcrafted, high-end pieces to customers across the country. But despite their prestigious reputation, their online presence was struggling.
✅ Slow load times—customers were abandoning the site.
✅ Unreliable hosting—their shared server couldn’t handle traffic spikes.
✅ Large images and custom scripts—weighing the site down.
With so much of their sales process depending on their website—both for online orders and as an in-store catalog for their sales teams—every second of downtime was money lost.
They needed a solution that was fast, stable, and secure.
The Fix: Enterprise Hosting, Performance Optimization, and Failover Protection
Step one? Move them to a hosting solution that could actually support their needs.
🔹 We migrated them to an enterprise-grade dedicated server, specifically tuned for WordPress performance.
🔹 We deployed a CDN (Amazon S3 + Cloudfront) to ensure images loaded instantly from any location.
🔹 We optimized their massive photo library—compressing images without losing quality.
🔹 We cleaned up their WordPress setup—removing unnecessary plugins, minifying scripts, and implementing lazy loading.
🚀 The immediate impact? Site speeds skyrocketed, and customer frustration disappeared.
📌 Failover Protection – Knowing downtime meant lost business, we implemented a disaster recovery plan.
✅ Regularly generated static HTML copies of their site, stored in a backup Amazon S3 instance.
✅ If the primary server ever failed, we could immediately switch to the backup site—ensuring continued access.
They now had a faster, more reliable site, ready to handle growth.
The Unexpected Threat: A President’s Day Weekend Cyberattack
Everything was running smoothly—until a sudden spike in server traffic sent our monitoring alerts into overdrive on President’s Day weekend.
Massoud’s sales team in San Marcos, CA was suddenly locked out of the site. Customers were reporting crashes.
📊 Server calls had increased by 1000%.
📊 Massive amounts of requests were flooding the site.
📊 It was a full-scale DDoS attack.
Massoud Furniture’s story is a perfect example of why hosting, speed, and security aren’t just tech concerns—they’re business-critical.
For a company like Massoud, this was the worst possible timing. President’s Day weekend is one of the biggest furniture sales events of the year. If the site went down, they’d lose tens of thousands of dollars in sales.
They called us in the middle of the night. And we answered.
The Battle Plan: Stopping the DDoS Attack Without Blocking Customers
We immediately sprang into action:
🛑 Step 1: Identify the Attack – We checked server logs and traffic sources, pinpointing bot-driven malicious traffic overwhelming the site.
🛑 Step 2: Provision More Server Resources – We scaled up server capacity, ensuring real customers weren’t locked out.
🛑 Step 3: Block Malicious Traffic – Using Cloudflare and server-side rules, we isolated and blocked bad IP groups without affecting real buyers.
It wasn’t just a one-time block. The attack was evolving—every time we shut down one wave of bots, new ones popped up. It was a long weekend of monitoring, blocking, and adapting—but the result?
✅ The site stayed online the entire weekend.
✅ No legitimate customers were blocked.
✅ Massoud Furniture made it through their biggest sales event without disruption.
The Aftermath: A Stronger, More Secure Online Presence
After the attack, Massoud Furniture fully committed to long-term security and performance:
✔ Continuous security monitoring – Early detection before problems escalate.
✔ Custom WordPress updates – Keeping their site fast, lean, and optimized.
✔ A responsive hosting partner – Knowing they could call us anytime for immediate support.
📌 The biggest win? Their peace of mind.
Massoud’s site isn’t just a store—it’s a mission-critical tool for both online customers and in-store sales teams across the country. Knowing their investment is safe, secure, and fast means they can focus on selling, not site maintenance.
The Takeaway: Why Hosting & Security Aren’t Optional
Massoud Furniture’s story is a perfect example of why hosting, speed, and security aren’t just tech concerns—they’re business-critical.
For large-scale e-commerce businesses, the key lessons are:
✔ Don’t wait until performance issues hurt your business.
✔ Shared hosting won’t cut it for high-traffic sites.
✔ A CDN can drastically improve speed for media-heavy sites.
✔ A strong security response can save a business from disaster.
Most importantly? Having a real team that knows your site inside and out makes all the difference.
We don’t just keep sites online. We keep businesses running.