In the last 12 months we have seen steady growth in many aspects of the Deflect project, particularly with respect to membership, traffic, localisation and network capacity. The most significant contributing factors have been the uptake of more partners, the efficacy of our new banning software and the continued rise in DDoS attacks as a form of censorship.
To this end, we have more than doubled the number of our partners, so Deflected sites now operate in 17 languages and focus on affairs in 55 countries across the world. In addition, we have taken on more sites that report news or advocate for issues from a transnational perspective, resulting in a more even distribution of traffic from around the world.
A comparison between the first quarters of 2013 and 2014 shows this clearly.
We see that unique visitors have nearly tripled, the number of visits has more than doubled, page requests have all multiplied, hits are between four and five times as many and we are dealing with at least twice the amount of bandwidth as this time last year. The figures continue to grow as we move into March and April because of the current Ukraine situation. In the wake of the Euromaidan protests, the fall of the Yanukovich government and the annexation of the Crimea, we brought onto the network a number of key independent news sites operating in the region that have brought with them a large amount of traffic and a comparable amount of DDoS attacks.
The figures above are only for the legitimate traffic served. With respect to malicious requests, we saw an average of around 8MBps across the network for the month and when we first took on the Ukranian sites in March we saw spikes of 200 bots per edge.