Patent ID: 7136922

Claim:
A method of protecting an origin server having a local domain name server associated therewith using a content delivery network that comprises at least one domain name server and a set of content servers, comprising: determining whether a given condition exists at the origin server, wherein the given condition is one of: a failure at the origin server, an occurrence of excess demand at a Web site hosted on the origin server, a receipt of a request for content that cannot then be served from the origin server, an occurrence of excess traffic to the Web site originating from a given geography or network, an occurrence of excess latency at the Web site as measured by network agents, and a denial of service attack; if the given condition exists, dynamically rewriting a local DNS record in the local domain name server to point to a CDN domain instead of a domain associated with given content normally hosted on the origin server, wherein, as a result of the rewriting step, a DNS query received at the local domain name server and directed to the domain associated with the given content normally hosted on the origin server is automatically redirected for handling to the content delivery network domain name server instead of being handled directly by the local domain name server associated with the origin server; at the content delivery network domain name server, resolving the CDN domain that was generated as a result of the rewriting step to identify an IP address of one of the set of content servers; and delivering the given content from the identified CDN content server.