A few days after Akamai Technologies Inc. launched a service for speeding up media-heavy websites, CloudFlare Inc. is upping the ante by rolling out two new administrative tools to its rivaling content delivery network. The first addition is a security system called Traffic Control that promises to help companies make their online properties more resilient to distributed denial-of-service attacks.

The service provides the ability to limit the number of requests that are accepted in a given time frame based on factors such as their source and purpose, which allows for more much granular filtering than before. An online retailer, for instance, could use the functionality to set a stricter usage cap on its resource-intensive catalog export API than its main product page. And queries that seek to upload rather than download data can be similarly vetted to protect sensitive website components like login forms.

While it can be used with any online property, CloudFlare sees Traffic Control coming particularly handy for mobile APIs, which are typically more vulnerable to DDoS attacks than regular web applications. And also they’re less equipped to handle naturally-occurring usage spikes that occur as a result of an unexpected exposure boost or event. This issue is the focus of the second service that is launching as part of today’s rollout.

CloudFlare Traffic Manager enables companies to manually route requests to different data centers and machines in the provider’s network when its automated load balancer doesn’t cut it. In a situation where a website experiences a sudden influx of international visitors, the service can be used to redirect every user’s requests to specific content delivery facilities in their proximity. And it’s also handy for dealing with technical issues that render a website’s usual caching servers unavailable.

Traffic Manager and Traffic Control are currently available in early access.

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