CloudFlare turns 5 years old this September. It's been an amazing ride since our launch. Before we launched at TechCrunch Disrupt on September 27, 2010, we'd signed up about 1,000 beta customers. It took us nine months to get those first customers. (By comparison, today we typically sign up 1,000 customers every 3 hours.)
Those first beta customers were instrumental. They put up with us when we were had only one data center (in Chicago). They put up with us as we brought traffic online in our next facilities in Ashburn, Virginia and San Jose, California — and had the routing challenges that came along with running a distributed network for the first time. They sent us bug reports, provided us feature requests, and were instrumental to building the foundation that grew into what is CloudFlare today.
Archival Footage
When we launched, we wanted to feature their stories and experience about CloudFlare so we had them submit their stories by video. Here's the video we included as part of our launch presentation.
I'm proud of the fact that more than 80% of those original 1,000 customers are still using CloudFlare five years later.
Send Us Your Stories
As we get ready to celebrate our fifth birthday, we wanted to reach out to our customers again — now well over two million of you. Our ask is the same as the first time: make a short video and tell us what you love about CloudFlare.
We'll put together a montage of some of the videos as part of our birthday celebration. And, for the users who send us the best submissions, we'll fly you to San Francisco and put you up to be a part of our birthday celebration on Thursday, September 24th.
Thank you for helping us build CloudFlare over the last five years. We look forward to watching your videos, hearing your stories about CloudFlare, and celebrating our fifth birthday together in about a month. Until then, stay tuned for a number of announcements over the coming weeks. We're pretty sure we'll be able to top our birthday surprises of years past.
Visit our video submissions page for instructions on how to enter.