Post Mortem: The Ugly, the Bad & the Good
02/24/2012
Last night was not our finest hour. Around 07:30 GMT, we were finishing up a push of a new DNS infrastructure. The core of what this new update was built to do is make DNS updates even faster. ...
02/24/2012
Last night was not our finest hour. Around 07:30 GMT, we were finishing up a push of a new DNS infrastructure. The core of what this new update was built to do is make DNS updates even faster. ...
02/22/2012
On Monday, CloudFlare officially announced Page Rules. The new feature allows you to customize behavior on a page-by-page basis. The previous two blog posts have outlined how you can turn off CloudFlare's features based on URL patterns, or accomplish advanced URL forwarding....
02/21/2012
In the last blog post, I introduced Page Rules and showed how you could use it to control CloudFlare's features like Apps, Performance, and Security settings on a page-by-page basis. Here I'm going to explain how you can use the same Page Rules interface to enable URL forwarding....
02/20/2012
CloudFlare is provisioned by DNS. That means that, from the beginning, you've been able to turn CloudFlare on or off on a subdomain level. From the CloudFlare DNS Manager. Often, however, users have wanted finer-grained control. ...
02/17/2012
Today, CloudFlare adds more than 250 customers every ~6 hours, but getting our first 250 took several months and a lot of faith. When we started working on CloudFlare, an employee at a major CDN company warned us that we had no idea all the crazy things people did with their websites....
02/03/2012
We're happy to announce that CloudFlare's Miami data center is now online. Our 14th data center has been in the works for some time now. The new facility, which is among our largest, will serve much of Central and South America....
01/16/2012
CloudFlare, as a service, illustrates the power of using DNS to make the Internet better. Unfortunately, some current legislation up for consideration in the United States illustrates the power of using DNS to make the Internet worse. ...
01/12/2012
We regularly monitor the Alexa top 1 million websites for trends. Specifically, we've been tracking how many of them support IPv6 connections. The numbers are still low but have been improving. ...
01/06/2012
I just got off the phone with a reporter. Like many reporters or analysts we talk to, she wanted to put CloudFlare into a defined category. Specifically, she wanted to call us a content delivery network (CDN) and compare us with companies like Akamai or Amazon's CloudFront. ...
12/21/2011
As the year comes to a close, we've been assembling trend data for 2011. One of the most interesting has been the rise of denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Controlling for CloudFlare's growth, we've seen a 700% increase in DDoS attacks over the course of the year....
12/16/2011
In 2004, Lee Holloway and I started Project Honey Pot. The site, which tracks online fraud and abuse, primarily consists of web pages that report the reputation of IP addresses. ...
12/15/2011
I was talking last week with Shawn Graham, a reporter at Fast Company, and he asked a simple but interesting question: do hackers take the holidays off?...
12/09/2011
In the next few hours, CloudFlare will cross having served more than 100 billion page views over the last year. We've been growing very quickly. To give you a sense, a quarter of the total page views for the year (about 25 billion) has come in just the last 30 days....
12/02/2011
I wrote a post last week about Surviving Black Friday, the biggest offline shopping day of the year in the United States. However, the biggest online shopping day of the year in the United States is said to be the Monday after Thanksgiving, known as Cyber Monday....
11/24/2011
This is the story of two things that are deeply American: post-Thanksgiving shopping and scrappy entrepreneurs. On the fourth Thursday in November, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving. The Friday after, known as Black Friday, is considered the official start of the holiday shopping season. ...
11/16/2011
The United States House of Representatives is considering the Stop Online Piracy Act, known as SOPA. Companies including Google, Zynga, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Mozilla, along with organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have been sharply critical of the law....
11/14/2011
Sometime on Sunday, November 13, 2011 (which was a pretty awesome day on its own, quite aside from this news) we crossed the point of having saved our users 2 petabytes of bandwidth. That's a staggering amount of data. ...
11/12/2011
A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal named CloudFlare the most innovative Networking & Internet Technology of 2011. We were pretty flattered given that winners from other categories included IBM for Watson......
11/11/2011
We regularly get requests to provide a free paid account in exchange for promoting CloudFlare. I may be naive, but I was surprised to learn how many web companies go along with these arrangements — or even suggest them themselves. ...
11/10/2011
As our network map will soon indicate, CloudFlare's London (LHR) data center is now online. The team started routing traffic through it this beginning at 12:13 GMT. We're already doing more than 1Gbps of traffic through LHR, most of which would previously have been routed to Amsterdam....