Forrester Research, Inc. has released The Forrester Wave™: DDoS Services Providers, Q3 2015 report which ranks CloudFlare as a leader. How do you get placed “up and to the right”? The leaders in this Wave, including CloudFlare, demonstrated effective portals, good client and revenue growth, and a focus on customer service. They also all have the ability to defend against the largest amplification attacks and the most pernicious application attacks.

Here’s some of the criteria CloudFlare received the highest possible scores for:

• Attack types defended

• Data/scrubbing center geographic presence

• Detection tactics

• SSL traffic inspection

The DDoS Services Providers Wave also notes that CloudFlare boasts fast mitigation times, and that our customers gave us high marks for service delivery. The report cited CloudFlare’s excellent capabilities to deliver hybrid DDoS solutions as well.

So how does the report evaluate vendors? It evaluates vendors based on three major categories, each with specific criteria:

• Current offering:The strength of vendors’ current DDoS product offering is based on evaluation categories including: business description, amplification attack defense, attack types defended, customer portal features, customer references, data/scrubbing center geographic presence, SSL traffic inspection, and standard mitigation times.

• Strategy:Vendors’ position on the horizontal axis of the Wave graphic in the report indicates the strength of their DDoS strategy, specifically as it relates to our customer communication process, hybrid implementation availability, system integration partners, technical development, professional services, and sales staff.

• Market Presence:Vendors’ market presence was measured based on their client base, revenue, revenue growth, and the number of years the company has offered DDoS services. One thing to note here, CloudFlare does not share financial information--this is our policy as a private company. That said, our scores for revenue and revenue growth in the market presence category were determined without sharing this information. Because of our policy, we could only share information about our client base and the number of years we have offered DDoS services.

Forrester evaluated nine participating vendors for this report. Inclusion criteria used for vendor selection for this evaluation were a mix of the breadth of each vendor’s offerings, its global presence, and its market relevance.

To check out the full report, download your complimentary copy here.

We are honored to be included and ranked as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: DDoS Services Providers, Q3 2015 report.

Source: The Forrester Wave™: DDoS Services Providers, Q3 2015, Forrester Research, Inc., July 22, 2015

At CloudFlare, we love connecting with our communities, and so we are excited to announce two meetups to be hosted here at the CloudFlare headquarters in San Francisco next month.

All Things Crypto - 5/8/2014

On Thursday, May 8, Nick Sullivan from the security engineering team at CloudFlare will host a meetup with several cryptography industry experts. The meetup will consist of three speakers giving quick 15-20 minute presentations followed by Q&A. Speakers and topics include: Trevor Perrin who will discuss "next-generation" protocols in end-to-end security for applications like chat, text messaging, and email, Brian Warner who will be discussing Firefox Sync, and Michael Hamburg who will discuss new developments in Elliptic Curve Cryptography. If you are interested in anything and everything about cryptography, then this meetup is for you! Doors open at 6:00pm PDT. RSVP on the CloudFlare Meetup page

GoSF - 5/21/2014

GoSF is a meetup group that has been around since 2011 and caters to those who program in Go. On Wednesday, May 21, CloudFlare will be hosting GoSF’s Go Session 2 - Programming in Go (for Experienced Devs). Go Sessions are part of a program designed by GoSF members to provide a guided pair-programming experience to increase knowledge of using Go in production. Experienced Go developers will lead coding exercises that will run you through Go compiling, dependency management, program structure, concurrency, and more. Interested in learning more? RSVP on the GoSF meetup page.

In addition to the networking and learning these meetups offer, CloudFlare provides pizza and beverages for all attendees. We hope to see some of you at our next event!

We get asked this question all the time: How do I make my website faster? So, on Thursday, we're holding a webcast to go through our recommendations and also answer your questions live.

We'll discuss:

• the basics of getting set up for speed

• what to cache and why

• image optimization and virtualization techniques (Polish and Mirage)

• JavaScript optimization (Rocket Loader)

This session is geared toward website owners who want to understand the basics of performance on CloudFlare and who may have no prior knowledge of our service. CloudFlare makes your websites faster, safer and smarter. Join us on Thursday, December 12 from 10 to 10:30am Pacific (18:00 to 18:30pm UTC) and we'll show you how simple it is to go faster. Register here.

CloudFlare is headed to the Interactive portion of SXSW in Austin from March 7-11, 2014. We are very excited to share some of the knowledge and experiences we’ve gained since our CloudFlare journey began. We have five, hot topic panel submissions that are in the running, so if any of the topics below sound interesting, cast your vote today.

About the 2014 SXSW PanelPicker:The 2014 SXSW PanelPicker public voting ends on Friday, September 6 at 11:59PM CT. PanelPicker voting counts for 30% of a sessions acceptance to SXSW.

NSA and the Future of Web Users and Web CompaniesMatthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO at CloudFlare, will join a panel with other industry experts to engage in a frank discussion about the NSA, online surveillance, and the privacy expectations from the perspective of both web users and web companies.

Movies and Music: Always Online EntertainmentNick Sullivan, a Systems Engineer at CloudFlare, put together a panel of experts, comprised of a variety of engineers who have all worked in the trenches for companies Rdio, SoundCloud, Apple and Netflix, to discuss the ins and outs of running a network built to scale for streaming and major releases.

Recruit the Best: Practical Tips to Build a TeamWhether you are a startup, small business or a manager at a large organization, finding and retaining the best talent is critical to your success. Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder and Head of User Experience at CloudFlare will provide her insights and practical tips for building a team.

How a Partnership Can Make or Break Your BusinessThis duo presentation featuring Maria Karaivanova, head of Strategic Partnerships at CloudFlare, and Bill Lapcevic, VP of Business Development at New Relic, will cover how to build partnerships that rock, keeping you, your partners and your customers happy and thriving. Learn from these industry experts as they discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of architecting large-scale partnerships.

Why, How, and When to Build a SaaS Sales TeamChris Merritt, Sales Lead at CloudFlare, is joining Jamie Sutherland of Xero and Lars Leckie of Hummer Winblad in a session that will draw on sales leaders and experts that have built both inside and field sales teams. They will dig into the vagaries of building and running a sales team including lessons from recruiting, hiring, commission structures, and more.

The CloudFlare team will be at HostingCon 2013 in Austin next week. This is our third year at the show and we have a lot of things in store for partners.

Here's a sneak peek:

• Complimentary limousine transfers from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to the Hilton Austin hotel on Sunday, June 16th. Reserve your spot today!

• New CloudFlare tshirts

• Live music to supercharge your day during breakfast each morning

• Charging stations at our booth (#523) to keep your devices supercharged

• Bigger and better Nerf Railguns. There is limited quantity, so be sure to visit us at booth #523 to get your Railgun

CloudFlare Railguns ready for HostingCon 2013

We are looking forward to connecting with our current partners and meeting new partners at the show. If you are already a CloudFlare Certified Partner, be sure to stop by and introduce yourself. If you are not a partner yet, stop by to learn more about how CloudFlare can reduce your server load, improve the performance of your network, block spammers, botnets and other web threats, and provide DDOS protection. More details about the CloudFlare Certified Partner program here.

Here's where the CloudFlare team will be all week:

Limo transfers from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to the Hilton Austin Hotel.

Registration is still open, reserve your spot now!

• 7:45am-8:45am: CloudFlare sponsored breakfast located in the Level 4, Ballroom D Foyer - Live music by Alternator Jones

• 5:00pm onwards: Come find the CloudFlare team at the welcome reception!

• 7:45am-8:45am: CloudFlare sponsored breakfast located in the Level 4, Ballroom D Foyer - Live music by Jackie Venson

• 12:00pm-4:00pm: CloudFlare is in Exhibit Hall 4 at booth #523

• 4:00pm-6:30pm: Visit our booth during the exhibit hall happy hour for a beverage and to supercharge your mobile phone!

• 8:00am-10:00am: CloudFlare sponsored breakfast located in the Level 4, Ballroom D Foyer - Live music by Sean Evan

• 9:00am-9:45am: Our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince will be speaking on the IPv6 panel discussion "Now is the Time for IPv6" in room #18D

• 9:00-9:45am: Maria Karaivanova and John Roberts from CloudFlare will be co-hosting a talk on partnerships, "Strategies for Successful Partnerships" in room #16

• 12:00-4:00pm: CloudFlare is in Exhibit Hall 4 at Booth #523

Connect with us on Twitter during the event to find out where we are and what's coming up next:#hostingcon, @hostingcon, @CloudFlare

See you in Austin!

Below are highlights and video clips from five of those conversations. Tune in to hear the latest in mobile services, how hosting providers are expanding across the world, and what these companies are looking forward to in 2013.

When it comes to mobile, TuCows is giving AT&T and Verizon a run for their money with Ting. Elliot explains the benefits of Ting, what's new with their mobile service and why wifi on your phone is all the rage...

For 2013, Hostnet's application and POA program is really starting to take off. Listen in as Merjin discusses how they've grown and what new services they're bringing to their customers in 2013...

Providing an arrange of hosting services, ViUX is improvingperformance and reliability for their customers and considers themselves a complete Parallels shop. One area they pride themselves on? Customer service...

Limestone Networks is in the business of mission critical data. Their infrastructure supports some of the most reliable data centers around. Their support motto? Simple. Solid. Superior.

Atomia is making it easier than ever to run a business. They focus on the automation and billing platform for hosting providers so businesses can focus on what they do best. Hear what Atomia is working on for 2013...

For these conversations, CloudFlare co-founderMichelle Zatlyn sat down with 15 leading experts in the hosting and service provider industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting and web services.

Below are highlights and video clips from five of those conversations. We will be posting the rest of the videos next week.

When it comes to the adoption of Plesk 11, Dan says it's all about the gateway. Listen in as he discusses Plesk 11 benefits, changes to the hosting space in the last few years, and what country Parallels is really big in right now...

Sam knows spam. As the CEO of one of the most widely deployed packages offered in the APS catalog, Sam has seen all the trends in email spam. Sam tells us what hosting providers are most concerned about and what the newest sector of email spam looks like...

"We have to adapt. If we're not doing it, we won't sell" - Marco emphasizes ease of adoption and making UIs as simple as possible. Oh, and LuxCloud is a globally impacting company with an employee headcount that might surprise you...

MobeeArt is like mobile magic, for your website. MobeeArtautomatically converts websites to mobile. Sound too good to be true? It's not. And they are announcing a feature that's going to make running a mobile website even better...

Michele has his finger on the pulse of Internet policy. There are big issues the hosting industry will be facing over the next few years. Michele discusses these issues and what we can do to help...

When you think of San Francisco, undoubtedly one bridge in particular comes to mind - The Golden Gate Bridge. This year, however, the Bay Bridge is getting its moment in the spotlight thanks to Words Pictures Ideas, a CloudFlare customer.

Words Pictures Ideas services brands and organizations in need of smarter communications. While thinking of ways to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Bay Bridge, WPI founder Ben Davis came up with the idea to turn the West Span of the bridge into a canvas for light art.

Partnering with internationally renowned light artist Leo Villareal, Ben and the WPI team began working on what would become the world's largest LED light sculpture: The Bay Lights.

The Bay Lights were officially unveiled on March 5, 2013. Brian VanderZanden, Lead Developer at WPI, knew there would be a surge in traffic to TheBayLights.org leading up to that day, and most likely a huge surge in traffic on the day of the unveiling. WPI has many sites on CloudFlare, including TheBayLights.org. He reached out to CloudFlare to make sure the site was ready to handle the increase in traffic.

CloudFlare suggested a few small optimizations (minification, an image that wasn't proxied because on a "grey cloud" DNS record), one useful reminder (allowlist the CloudFlare IPs), and a powerful recommendation: Cache Everything.

By default, CloudFlare will cache obviously static assets, but pass dynamic HTML through to the customer's webserver. For heavy load, on content that is not changing rapidly, full HTML pages -- or the entire site -- can be delivered from CloudFlare's global network, preserving the customer's webserver, database and other infrastructure. (Note: combined with single file purge, CloudFlare can serve as the global network for delivering a static site even with rapid changes, much as the Obama 2012 web team did.)

On the day of the unveiling, with Cache Everything turned on,TheBayLights.org saw traffic increase with a decrease on their system's resource utilization.

By mid-day, a rush in traffic caused more load than the event's peak at 8:00 pm. The graph below shows an interesting resource demand for the site pre/post cache everything:

The site saw the largest influx of traffic between 8:00-9:00 pm, but the average I/O during that hour was under 2Mb/s. By midnight traffic was back down to only 2X of baseline traffic levels.

"We began to celebrate at 9:15 pm as we were confident that the peak in site traffic had been reached and there were no issues," said Brian. "We are thrilled with the guidance and help CloudFlare offered in keeping us online during our biggest moment of the year, as well as the day to day performance and security they provide for all of our sites."

The Bay Lights will continue to shine for the next two years, creating yet another tourist stop in San Francisco. At CloudFlare, we are excited to be a part of the experience and look forward to helping keep TheBayLights.org shining online.

CloudFlare is heading to Parallels Summit in Las Vegas on Monday, February 4th to Wednesday, February 6th. We look forward to meeting and reconnecting with service providers and providing complimentary limo rides between the airport and the Caesars Palace hotel.

We recently launched a partnership with Parallels. Any Parallels service provider can increase revenue, while providing security and performance to customers' web properties and applications.

If you are already a CloudFlare Certified Partner, come introduce yourself at our booth (#113) and hear what we've been working on. If you are not a partner yet, stop by to learn more about CloudFlare and ways we can work together.

8am-4pm: Limo transfers from McCarran International Airport to the Caesars Palace Hotel. Sign up now to ride in style!

4pm-7pm: Welcome Reception and Exhibit Hall opening, find CloudFlare at booth #113.

CloudFlare limo rides

12:30pm onwards: CloudFlare is in the Exhibit Hall at Booth #113.

1pm-4pm: Conversations with CloudFlare - We will be conducting live video interviews with thought leaders within the web services industry, including founders and executives. Check out the video interviews we conducted at HostingCon 2013.

4pm-5pm: Our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince will be speaking on the cloud portfolio panel breakout session "What's in your 2013 Cloud Portfolio?"

7pm-11pm: Come find us at the conference attendee party at PURE nightclub

Industry leader interviews

10:30am onwards: CloudFlare is in the Exhibit Hall at Booth #113.

2pm: Our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince will be presenting in the Partners Theater Presentation.

Connect with us on Twitter during the event to find out where we are and what's coming up next:

#parallelssummit@ParallelsSummit@CloudFlare

Viva Las Vegas!

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We enjoy working with companies who share a focus on website security. When GamaSec, an online web vulnerability-assessment service, inquired about ways to integrate, we were excited to make their scanning service available as a CloudFlare app, where any CloudFlare customer can easily turn on GamaSec.

GamaSec's cloud-based security scan serves as an early-warning system of defense for web operation, applications, and online information. GamaSec can be used by any website of any size and is now available to all CloudFlare customers: https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/gamasec

GamaSec goes beyond signature-based tools to find more "real" vulnerabilities.

The GamaSec Application Vulnerability Scanner identifies application vulnerabilities such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and Code Inclusion, as well as site exposure risks. It also ranks threat priority, produces highly graphical, intuitive HTML reports, and indicates site security posture by vulnerabilities and threat exposure.

Regular use of GamaSec's on-demand vulnerability assessment service provides the following benefits:

• Fully automated scans

• Easy dashboard & reporting

• Web application SaaS Scanner

• Update vulnerability protection

• Trusted Website Security Seal

• Web Application Scan via Cloud Computing

Like all CloudFlare apps, GamaSec is one-click simple, turned on in a customer's app dashboard.

There are two different plans, including Basic for $7.99 a month, per domain, and Premium for $16.99 a month, per domain, to fit the varied needs of different customers.

Visit the GamaSec app page to learn more and to get signed up!

P.S. GamaSec followed the CloudFlare app development process. CloudFlare is hiring to extend our platform.

Forecasters have estimated that online holiday shopping will account for almost 25 percent of total ecommerce sales in 2012. That's more than $54 Billion dollars in online transactions. With so much shopping happening online, we thought we'd talk to one of our ecommerce customers to hear what they do to prepare their site for the busiest time of the year.

Luxury Link curates exclusive travel experiences with luxury properties around the world at insider prices. Chris Holland is the Director of Technology at Luxury Link, and has more than 16 years of web development experience. I recently spoke with Chris to learn more about Luxury Link, what he has seen over the years in the ecommerce industry, and what it's like to run an ecommerce site when the holidays hit.

Since 1997, luxurylink.com has evolved from an exclusive e-mail list to exclusive online listings. Luxury Link has pioneered the web-based auction model for Luxury Travel. Our audience is extremely savvy, discerning and demanding of the greatest possible value for the most outstanding luxury vacation experiences.

While we used to have the niche to ourselves, the online travel landscape is competitive and so we are constantly working to optimize our website to make sure our visitors get the most out of the experience. Our web property experience includes everything from design to merchandising to site performance to SEO and the conversion funnel, as well as offering valuable insights to travelers while accommodating innovative marketing and product strategies. We, in the Tech Team, have our work cut out for ourselves catering to many business functions.

We've had to evolve beyond merely "selling online." It's no longersufficient to put up a page clamoring "Here are 12 a mazing vacations this week." We've seen travelers increasingly seeking inspiration and guidance. Finding the right vacation is a personalized and, at times, challenging process as many variables need to be juggled. While we've dramatically improved search and categorization on our site, we're just getting started. Solving these problems is less about using a specific search technology like Lucene, SphinX, SLI Systems, or Endeca and more about information architecture and accommodating a critical factor: Human curation. Everything you see on our site is an ever-evolving blend of human and machine curation. While search engines will seek out what you want, we have the added responsibility of helping visitors shape their traveling desires.

These core fundamentals really matter: performance, SEO, business intelligence, merchandising, and seasonal relevance.

For site performance, one of the tools we use is CloudFlare. To audit and monitor site speed, we use a blend of inexpensive resources such as webpagetest.org,Google PageSpeed Insights, and WatchMouse(now Nimsoft Cloud Monitor). I'll defer to your local expert to cover SEO.

We leverage Google Analytics and in-house-built event frameworks and data warehousing for various aspects of business intelligence. I'm a big fan of Tableau Software to crunch data.For any site, and especially commerce sites, analyzing your marketing channels and respective conversion rates can uncover valuable insights: A/B testing is a very important part of this process. We've found PHP Scenario very helpful and we've integrated it into our A/B testing platform.

You might also consider giving your customers a voice by launching a community around your brand. While we've had a community on our site for some time, participation in it had died down. In 2012 we completely revamped it into "The Luxury Lounge" -- This initiative has brought about renewed interest from our loyal members in sharing their travel experiences. It's a veritable trove of great travel insights. It is positive for SEO, as well.

Online commerce has had to evolve beyond just listing and selling products, as competition and margins have become fierce. Consumers seek insights and guidance. Commerce sites featuring fresh, relevant and timely content in the form of editorial and consumer insights, tend to do better than sites that don't. In recognition of this, Google's algorithm updates have shaken things up. Incumbent sites that once merely listed products are finding themselves displaced by sites offering relevant content about those products. SEO is an exciting world where quality content is king, and this has had an impact on every commerce site I've worked on.

It is typically all about Q1 for the travel industry. We expect a 50% jump in traffic in January over November. While we do have plenty of capacity, CloudFlare's "always-on" feature is a nice safety net.

We ensure our zabbix monitors are well-tuned, stick to best practices when deploying new code, don't stray away from our phones at nights, and generally do everything we can to ensure the site is running fast.

The top five pages and locations people are looking at include:

• Ski and Snow Destinations

• Caribbean

• Cabo San Lucas

• London

• BaliGuided Tours

Our server origin is in downtown Los Angeles. We have seen a big speed difference in the average time it takes to download a dynamic web page weighing 23,000 bytes from Texas:

Without CloudFlare: 569 milliseconds
With CloudFlare: 332 milliseconds

This is for dynamic content. In other words, for this type of request, CloudFlare has to fetch the dynamic content from our system, and then pass it along to the user, every time. Going through CloudFlare for dynamic content delivery is 42 percent faster.

Overall, I believe CloudFlare is the best thing to happen to the Web in recent memory, and by extension, the Internet at large. CloudFlare's infrastructure is staggering and the architecture and pace of innovation are simply impressive. CloudFlare's offerings have an incredibly positive impact on site owners and web visitors.

With two-factor authentication, our customers' accounts get an added layer of login security, ultimately adding another layer of security to their websites. We've been working on this feature for a while, and we are happy to announce that it's ready and available to all CloudFlare customers.

To make this feature happen, we worked with Authy, a startup who loves security too. Authy provides an easy-to-use, powerful two-factor authentication service. Their mission is to turn everyone's cell phone into a secure token. The Authy app works with iOS and Android devices and we're providing it free to all CloudFlare account holders. Here's how it works.

To turn two-factor authentication on, you simply log into your CloudFlare account, navigate to "My account" and select "two-factor authentication with Authy."

Once there, you will enter your mobile phone information and select "enable two-factor authentication."

You will then receive a text message (your provider's standard text messaging rates will apply). The text message includes a link to download the Authy app. The Authy app will ask you to enter your your mobile phone number. It will then text you a setup pin that you need to enter into the Authy app.

Once you receive your pin number via text, enter it into the Authy app. The Authy app will then be authorized and able to generate authentication tokens unique to your account. In the future, whenever you access your CloudFlare account you'll need three things: 1) your email address, 2) your password, and 3) your two-factor authentication token.

When you login to CloudFlare for the first time after enabling two-factor authentication, you will need to launch the Authy app on your phone. It will generate a unique, 7-digit authentication token. The authentication token is good for 30 seconds and then will change to a new token.

You can store your authentication for 14 days. If you login from an unrecognized device, or after your authentication expires, you'll need to open the Authy app and get your new authentication token for that device. The Authy app does not rely on you having network access, so you can retrieve your code even if your phone is not connected to the Internet.

If you ever lose your phone or get a new one you can reassociate your account by following the reset instructions on Authy's website.

You don't need to enable two-factor authentication in order to continue to use CloudFlare. However, we're providing it to all CloudFlare customers free and we recommend it for everyone who wants additional account security.

We get a lot of questions from our customers about CloudFlare and how we impact SEO. So when SEO.com signed up for CloudFlare, I thought it would be a great opportunity to talk to an expert to get the scoop on all things SEO. I was fortunate enough to connect with Derek Perkins, Vice President of Technology at SEO.com. With more than 12 years of industry experience, Derek provided his insight on SEO in general, debunked some of the myths out there, and gave us his take on what really works, and what doesn't, when it comes to SEO and your site.

DP - Step one - use WordPress and WordPress SEO. For most website owners, a Content Management System is key. The WordPress platform would be my first choice, you don't have to deal with structure of a Wordpress site to make sure it's easily searchable and findable. WordPress ranks high, especially if you activate WordPress SEO by Yoast. A combination of those two alone put you a long way ahead of where smaller business are. Correct structure is a good thing.

Step two - Focus on great content. Sporadic posting is never going to yield a tangible output. The more Google changes their algorithms, the more likely you will get ranked lower if you're not posting often. Just posting frequently however isn't enough. Content has always risen to the top of rankings, and as search engines mature, they are continuing to increase the signal to noise ratio. Posting great content regularly is the key to SEO success.

Step three - find good website hosting that will be elastic. Great content that gets picked up on TechCrunch, Digg, Reddit - any viral site - is going to see heavy spikes in traffic. If you're on a cheap hosting plan you often won't be able to scale to meet demands.

Actually, one of the first things I do is recommend CloudFlare. I love the CDN and scalability, it takes load off of the server so you don' have to worry so much about load spikes.

DP - A big misperception about SEO is the idea that you have to somehow change your writing or write things that are for search engines instead of humans. That's not the case. A lot of people also say you have to have unnaturally high keyword density and that's the only way you're going to rank. That's not good, it's harmful. Google sees that as if you're writing it specifically for SEO. Search engines try to read content as if they were human. If the content doesn't flow well or read well for a human, chances are it's not going to read well for a search engine or spider.

SEO is all about having good content. Write content you and others would like to read. It is more likely be shared socially, bringing more people to your site, and more people will link back to your site, growing your online presence.

When people think of SEO they tend to focus on the 10 percent that's the little tweaks that SEO companies can do for you, whereas the bulk of the value comes from writing good content.

DP - There are a number of places on the web that have good SEO forums. We have a link on our own site,www.SEO.com/forums, that links to a number of the best forums out there. Another great resource is SEOmoz, it's a great place for website owners to start.

DP - Number one thing that people don't do - they don't have any sort of targets. Content is king, but a lot of it is knowing what specificcontent is going to be most valuable to them. You can write about two different things that are both interesting, exciting and relevant to your audience, but one is relevant to maybe 10 searches a month, whereas one is relevant to 10,000 searches a month. Having an idea of what pages or blog posts or keywords you're targeting with each will help you tailor the content.

DP - Picking the wrong page titles and/or having a malformed HTML structure. There's a lot of SEO weight on title and header tags, you need to have your page title similar to whatever is in your H1 tag. A lot of site owners out there don't have header tags or have them set-up correctly. Even if they have a good title, the title might not be in the HTML header tag. The title and headers help both search engines and more importantly humans identify the focus of the page.

DP - I think SEO has a bit of a stigma because of old tactics that people used to use. You used to be able to immediately rank for SEO by using tricks like white text on a white background and various other tactics to gain the system. Even just recently Google has released things like Penguin, making it harder and harder to game the system. It changes how SEO agencies function, shifting the focus from link building to strategic content driven approaches. That has driven a proliferation of socially shareable content like infographics.

DP - Personally, I occasionally use Bing, but I tend to go back to Google. I took the test myself and Bing won 3 to 2, but I felt like the stripped down result pages weren't a perfect test.

DP - Bing has been gaining ground, Yahoo!'s results are powered by Microsoft, so Bing and Yahoo! will both show same results. The big two are definitely Google and Bing. You can't ignore Bing when you're tracking rankings, but they are definitely playing second fiddle to Google at this point.

For a long time Google has provided the best search rankings. Whether or not Bing has closed the gap on search, they have an uphill battle. People are used to Google, it's becoming part of the English language. I doubt that anyone outside of Microsoft headquarters has ever said "I don't know the answer, let me go Bing it."

I've been using CloudFlare for over a year now. I had a personal website calledsoccerreviews.com. I built it up to have significant traffic and I was really having server load issues, in addition to having been hacked twice. Because of that, security and scalability was very important to me.

I tried CloudFlare on that site and I now have it on 30 other sites. I have yet to have any of those sites compromised, which has been fantastic.

Once I joined SEO.com, I put us on CloudFlare. One feature I really like about CloudFlare is Rocket Loader. It combines all my javascript files and speeds them up, and they aren't all being downloaded separately, decreasing download time.

As for the impact to SEO, bounce rate plays a very important role in how Google does their rankings - they see that as a human factor in SEO. If someone immediately jumps back to Google, it's obviously not a good human source. A fast site that's always online is sure to help your rankings with lower bounce rates, and having CloudFlare helps to make this possible.

The San Francisco MarathonThe San Francisco Marathon is a popular race. With 24,000 runners competing in five events, the San Francisco Marathon has runners of all ages, from all over the globe. The website is used for registration, to organize runners during the actual event weekend and to track each runners race time.

"I really love how simple it was to set up and use. CloudFlare is an easy to use CDN service with offerings at all levels," said said Laura Baalman, an independent IT consultant to the San Francisco Marathon website. "I would recommend anyone with a website, especially those that get big changes in traffic, to give it a try."

Read full case study here.

StorifyStorify helps its users tell stories by curating social media. Storify sees huge spikes of traffic during major events around the world, like Hurricane Sandy or the U.S. presidential election.

"Thanks to services like CloudFlare, we can scale Storify to more than 24 million story views per month with only 3 engineers," said Xavier Damman, co-founder and CEO of Storify.

During Hurricane Sandy, CloudFlare saved Storify more than 75 million requests and over 470 GB of bandwidth.

"Having CloudFlare save these requests has enabled us to stay online and keep up with the surges in traffic due to significant news sharing during Hurricane Sandy," said Xavier.

Read full blog post here.

Runa TeaRuna produces guayusa tea sourced from the Ecuadorian Amazon. Guayusa balances as much caffeine as one cup of coffee with twice the antioxidants of green tea creating. The drink has gained popularity around the world, including among the CloudFlare team. It is always well-stocked in our kitchen.

"We love CloudFlare and recommend it to anyone looking for amazingresults," said Anna Premo Director of Marketing at Runa.

seo.comSeo.com is an experienced search marketing firm dedicated to making websites more visible online and profitable.

"I've been using CloudFlare for over a year now. I had a personal website which began to see significant traffic and I was really having server load issues. In addition, the site had been hacked twice. Because of that, security and scalability was important to me," said Derek Perkins, VP of Technology at SEO.com. "I tried CloudFlare on that website and I now have it on 30 other sites, including seo.com. I have yet to have any of those sites compromised, which has been fantastic."

ZopimZopim is an award winning, cloud based live chat platform that makes it easy for businesses to deliver fast customer service online. Businesses who sign up with Zopim are fanatics when it comes to delivering customer wow. More than 50,000 businesses use Zopim Live Chat to chat with their online customers everyday. Zopim is based in Singapore.

"Thanks to CloudFlare's CDN, our chat widget began loading extremely fast no matter where it was being loaded from," said Qing. "By caching and serving the static images on our widget, CloudFlare accelerated the byte load and reduced the widget loading time by at least 50%. Even our customers could feel the significant improvement in speed."

Read full case study here.

Ekaterina DokuchaevaEkaterina Dokuchaeva is a talented photographer from Russia with her own unique style and creativity. Despite the fact that Ekaterina is just 21 years old, she has already done exquisite art creations and continues to work hard in the photo-industry.

"There's an introduction song playing on the backround of the landing page. This song made page load speed very slow and visitors constantly complained that the site was not fast enough," said Dokuchaev Konstantin, who manages the site. "Once I enabled CloudFlare's CDN and compression features to our website, the page load time immediately reduced to three seconds in all browsers. It was great solution of our problem. I wasn't expecting such a noticable change!"

Do you have a story you'd like to share about CloudFlare? I'd like to hear it and feature you on our blog! testimonials@cloudflare.com

We are looking forward to co-hosting a meetup next week on Wednesday, November 14, with Braintree, the fastest growing payments platform for online and mobile commerce.

This meetup will:

• Answer all of your questions about what to look for as you decide which payments provider is best for you

• Debunk payment myths

• Give insight into what the future of payments may hold

The speakers will give an overview of various payment solutions for different business types and stage of growth. From startups to SMBs - this meetup will answer your questions and give guidelines for best practices in choosing an online payment service.

Braintree speakers will be Charity Kittler, who directs training at Braintree, and Jenna Wyer, VP of Sales for Braintree.

There will be pizza, beer and good times, hope to see you there!

Doors open at 6:30PM, presentation starts at 7PM.

RSVP for the Braintree and CloudFlare meetup

With Halloween around the corner, I caught up with one of our customers, the husband and wife team behind Pumpkinlady.com. If you haven't been to their website, it offers a range of pumpkin carving stencils and accessories for the holiday season. The website has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years. Lisa Berberette (aka, The Pumpkin Lady) has been featured on Good Morning America and the Home Shopping Network, not to mention she's carved pumpkins for Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. I sat down with Jack Berberette (aka, The Pumpkin Hubby) to talk about their business and what it's like to run a seasonal website.

CF: How long have you been running the website pumpkinlady.com?JB: This is our 15th season! In 1998 we noticed that there really weren't a lot downloadable carving patterns on the web, so Lisa created a bunch of patterns and I designed the site as a place for people to grab some cool freebies. We had no idea that the site would take off the way it did.

CF: What are some of the perks of running a seasonal website? What are some of the challenges?JB: Running a seasonal site is cool in that it's easy to focus on a particular niche and we can relax a bit outside of the busy season. The downside is that we only have a three month income window. We're in the process now of working on a non-seasonal specific line of artwork that will hopefully fill in the nine month gap.

CF: Is there anything you do to prepare your website for the busy holiday season?JB: Over the years, more and more pumpkin carving sites have popped up. Now competition is a good thing, but it does present search engine ranking challenges (this past year even more so with Google's algorithm change). So, in March I started researching Google "ranking rules" and how we fit in compared to our competitors....from there I started making measured tweaks to optimize SEO.

Aside from search engine ranking, running a high volume, seasonal Wordpress site has presented some interesting challenges. I am constantly looking for ways to reduce CPU usage, database calls and bandwidth. From custom code tweaks in the e-commerce backend, optimizing caching to CDN, there is quite a bit to prepare for each year. But I'm a nerd and like that sort of thing.

CF: What advice would you give to other small businesses running a seasonal site?JB: Content generation for a seasonal site is easy, creating a great visitor experience is the challenge. Seasonal sites, by their very nature, are highly competitive. "Big Box" sites have huge budgets to hone in on that market. So, to set yourself apart, make sure that your visitors feel that they are the single most important thing that has ever happened to your business. It doesn't matter if they don't purchase anything, only spend a buck or place a huge order...the customer wants to know that you care about them and their experience they had on your site. If you can convey this type of conviction, you will definitely have an edge over the world of auto-responders and canned replies.

CF: Any tips or tricks you'd like to share on using CloudFlare?JB: Yes...don't ever stop using it, and if you aren't using CloudFlare, start right now! As far as tips go, I pretty much use the defaultsettings as I have found that these work best with our site and its plugins. I do recommend activating the Google Analytics settings.

In his own words...Without a doubt, the single most significant performance and security enhancement our site has ever experienced has been the incredible impact CloudFlare has made. In just the past 30 days, CloudFlare has saved our site from over 21 million requests and over 200GB of bandwidth. Knowing that CloudFlare has my back with great support, resource savings and enhanced site security makes my job as a site owner so much easier. If you aren't using this incredible service, then you are missing out on something great.

~ Jack Berberette (www.pumpkinlady.com)

CloudFlare and StopBadware go way back. Even before CloudFlare was founded, our founders had been working with the StopBadware team to help make the Web a safer, better place for everyone. When CloudFlare introduced its phishing protection this summer, StopBadware was a great sounding board as we developed our remediation and notification process.

Today, we are excited to announce we have partnered with StopBadware to formalize this cooperation. StopBadware makes the Web safer through the prevention, mitigation, and remediation of badware websites. Their work protects people and organizations from becoming victims of viruses, spyware, scareware, and other badware.

As a StopBadware partner, CloudFlare will participate in forums, events and educational programs to help further protect websites all over the world. CloudFlare is providing its Business-level service, with extended performance and security, to stopbadware.organdbadwarebusters.org. We look forward to working with StopBadware and other partners in making the Web a better place!

Visit the StopBadware partner page to learn more about the program, or listen in to CloudFlare co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn, as she discusses StopBadware with executive director Maxim Weinstein.

CloudFlare protects a lot of websites - from eCommerce websites to blogs to SMBs to government sites, and everything in between. And now we can say we protect Einstein's brain through an interactive iPad app from the National Museum of Health + Medicine Chicago.

Thanks to the NMHMC, neuroscientists, researchers, educators and the general public now have access to Albert Einstein's brain via a new iPad app that will allow its users to examine the Nobel Prize-winning physicist's neuroanatomy as if they were sitting in front of a microscope.

The NMHMC Harvey App provides access to the Harvey Collection, from the National Museum of Health and Medicine, prepared by Dr. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein. The collection includes microscopic neuroanatomical slides prepared from approximately 170 areas of Einstein's brain and brainstem. Users can explore these ultra-high-resolution microscopic slide images at a variety of magnification levels, extending from low magnification all the way to cellular detail, just like with a physical microscope, all from their own network-connected iPads.

The iPad app launched today and we are thrilled that the NMHMC chose CloudFlare to help make sure their app was fast, secure and available for their new users. The iPad app has received a lot of media coverage around the world including USA Today, Venture Beat and The Sun, and with CloudFlare's help, the launch of the app has gone off without a hitch.

The NMHMC Harvey App is based on the VScope virtual microscope system from the National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago. For more information about the app, visit nmhmchicago.net/harvey.

What if there was an automated system that could analyze all of your page content, determine what your users are talking about and deliver highly targeted product references directly in your content? Say hello to Prosperent's ProsperLinks.

CloudFlare is excited to announce our newest app, Prosperent's ProsperLinks. Their affiliate tool is a very simple way to earn extra revenue on your content without diminishing your readers' experience.

When enabled and configured, it instantly analyzes your page content and turning product references into affiliated links. Additionally, ProsperLinks automatically affiliates existing links in your content. You get paid when your readers make a purchase!

Prosperent is an advertising company that specializes in retail and product advertising. With over 3,000 merchants including Zappos.com, 6pm, Overstock.com, Backcountry, REI, Nordstrom's and thousands of other retailers, Prosperent makes the best products available through their advertising products, and improves profitability for publishers.

With ProsperLinks, you are in control of the user experience. Choose from single underline, double underline, or links with a price comparison hover box. This allows you to maximize revenue while minimizing the impact to your visitors.

ProsperLinks is free to install and 70% of revenue will be paid to the website owner. CloudFlare will pay publishers directly, on a net-60 day basis. For example, revenue accrued in March will be paid by the end of May. Payments are made at the end of each month.

Sign up today!

CloudFlare recently integrated into the Parallels APS catalog and we couldn't be more excited. We are currently in the beta phase of our partnership, and we are looking forward to our official launch later this fall.

"Application Packaging Standard is a really quick way to connect CloudFlare to thousands of service providers around the world," said Alex. "We're really excited that CloudFlare is now integrated. What your company is offering for service providers is awesome."

Parallels was founded over 10 years ago and has more than 9,000 partners around the world. Today, they are present in 130 countries around the world.

"We help service providers use our software to deliver cloud services," said Alex. "We are making it easy for them to deliver a lot of solutions to the market."

At HostingCon 2012,CloudFlare co-founderMichelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.