Michelle, Lee and I started working on CloudFlare back in early 2009. It took about a year and a half for us to fully bake the idea, hire a team, write the code, build the start of a network, sign up beta customers to kick the tires, and then finally release CloudFlare to the public. On September 27, 2010, CloudFlare launched and so we think of today as our birthday. We're posting this two years to the minute from the moment CloudFlare went live to the public. Here's the video of our launch presentation:
Whirlwind
The last two years have been a whirlwind. Two years ago, we proudly announced on stage that we had 1,000 websites using CloudFlare during its initial year and a half of beta. Today, we have more than half a million and regularly sign up several thousand a day. Two years ago, we had seen 6 million unique IPs connect to our network. Today, we see about 600 million unique IPs connecting every month. Two years ago, we had powered 50 million page views. Today, we've powered more than half a trillion.
There is a lot of technology and infrastructure that has gone into building CloudFlare — we've literally added a new data center a month for every month since we launched, a pace we plan to continue. However, the real key to our scaling as quickly as we have has been CloudFlare's incredible team. There were eight of us that launched on stage two years ago. It was an incredible group. What I'm proud of is that, as the company has grown, we've continued to attract people who reflect that original team: great engineers who are also really good people.
I don't know of any other company in the world that handles a billion page views per month per employee — we handle two billion. The challenge and opportunity of working at CloudFlare is that when you push a line of code it affects over 200 million people in the next 24 hours. If you want to make an impact and learn how to work at real scale, there is no better place today than CloudFlare.
Everyone Loves Presents!
So what do we want for our birthday? Just to continue to grow and help build a better Internet. You can help. If you're already a CloudFlare customer, take a second to sign up another one of your websites, add a CloudFlare badge, or to tell your friends and colleagues about us. And, the best present of all, if CloudFlare seems like a place you'd thrive, then check out our careers page to apply to join our team.
Last year, we were surprised to learn that Google shared today as their birthday. We're fond of Google and see a lot of what we're doing as following in their footsteps. As we said when we launched, CloudFlare is bringing the resources previously reserved for the Internet giants to the rest of the web. Echoing Google, our mission is to build a faster, safer, better web. Two years in, we're well on our way.
