10/07/2013
CloudFlare uses a great deal of open source and free software. Our core server platform is nginx (which is released using a two-clause BSD license) and our primary database of choice is postgresql (which is released using their own BSD-like license). ...
10/04/2013
A few years ago, amidst the final crunch of a project deadline, a friend and former colleague looked me directly in the eye and said, "It's like I don't even know how to build a website anymore."...
10/03/2013
A critical zero-day vulnerability was published today affecting any hosting provider using WHMCS. As part of building a safer web, CloudFlare has added a ruleset to our Web Application Firewall (WAF) to block the published attack vector....
10/03/2013
When building secure systems, having a source of random numbers is essential. Without them, most cryptographic systems break down and the privacy and authenticity of communications between two parties can be subverted....
09/27/2013
Today is CloudFlare's birthday. We opened to the public exactly three years ago today, September 27, 2010. In those three years we've grown to power more than 1.5 million websites and sit in front of more than 4% of all web requests....
09/20/2013
If you connect to CloudFlare's web site using HTTPS the connection will be secured using one of the many encryption schemes supported by SSL/TLS. ...
09/13/2013
If you've been following recent news about technical spying by the US National Security Agency and the UK's Government Communications Headquarters you may have come across a claim that the NSA was involved in weakening a random number generator. ...
09/05/2013
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. ...
08/27/2013
At 1:19pm (PDT) today, a researcher noticed that the New York Times' website wasn't loading. We know the New York Times tech team, so we sent an email to check in. A few minutes later, the CTO of the NYT called us back. ...
08/27/2013
About a year ago, we realized that CloudFlare's current DNS infrastructure had some challenges. We were using PowerDNS, an open source DNS server that is popular with hosting providers. ...
08/24/2013
This blog post is very old now. You probably don't want to use the techniques described here. GO'S sync.Pool is a better way to go....
08/23/2013
We use nginx throughout our network for front-line web serving, proxying and traffic filtering. In some cases, we've augmented the core C code of nginx with our own modules, but recently we've made a major move to using Lua in conjunction with nginx. One project that's now almost entirely written in Lua is the new CloudFlare WAF that we blogged about the other day. The Lua WAF uses the nginx Lua module to embed Lua code and execute that code as part of the normal nginx handling of phases....
08/20/2013
Hi I’m Ken Carter, CloudFlare’s newly minted in-house counsel. Now that I have introduced myself, feel free to introduce yourself. Or, don’t. You may want to remain anonymous because you value your privacy. We do, too. ...
08/19/2013
We just rolled out an update to CloudFlare's Web Application Firewall (WAF). Previously, CloudFlare's WAF has received criticism from people who have tested it and found that it didn't behave as traditional WAFs are expected to. ...
08/09/2013
This question assumes the answer. A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain....
08/06/2013
We're going to do a series of blog posts about some of the inner workings of CloudFlare. One of the questions we get often is what the names of our name servers mean. Here's the story....
07/30/2013
One of the many great features that CloudFlare provides is protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. A malicious party who wants to make your website or web service unavailable could try to overwhelm it with requests from compromised machines (or bots) all around the world. ...
07/22/2013
CloudFlare operates at a significant scale, handling more than a trillion requests through our network every month. ...
07/18/2013
The web is one of the greatest inventions of human history because it has made the world more transparent. Fundamentally, that's what the web does: it takes information that was inaccessible and opaque and makes it available and lucid....
07/15/2013
In March 2013, we started testing Railgun, and slowly rolled it out across our three web properties. We saw immediate results. First, we saw instant reductions in time to retrieve uncached HTML documents, and as an ecommerce web property every millisecond counts....
07/11/2013
CloudFlare makes extensive use of TLS connections throughout our service which makes staying on top of the latest news about security problems with TLS a priority. We use TLS both externally and internally and different uses of TLS have different constraints....
07/08/2013
CloudFlare has Points of Presence (PoPs) in 23 datacenters around the world and plans to expand to many more soon. It also has a single portal, CloudFlare.com, where website owners interact with the system. ...
06/13/2013
Almost exactly a year ago, CloudFlare announced a feature called Mirage. Mirage was designed to make the loading of images faster in two primary ways....
06/12/2013
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. ...
06/12/2013
Over the last week we've closely watched the disclosures about the alleged NSA PRISM program. At CloudFlare, we have never been approached to participate in PRISM or any other similar program. ...
06/06/2013
June 6th is known as World IPv6 Day so we thought it was a good time to look at the trends in IPv6 usage across CloudFlare's network. ...
05/31/2013
Today at 16:13 UTC a large amount of traffic began hitting our Los Angeles data center. We have an in-house team that monitors our network 24x7x365 and immediately all their alarms went off....
05/08/2013
Yesterday, Syria's Internet connectivity was cut off from the rest of the world. At 14:12 UTC, approximately 19 hours and 30 minutes after it had been shut down, connectivity was returned....
05/07/2013
Today at 18:48 UTC, Syria dropped off the Internet. Based on the data we collect from our network, as well as reports from other organizations monitoring network routes, it appears that someone systematically withdrew the BGP. ...
04/28/2013
CloudFlare's first international office opened this month near St. Paul's Cathedral in London. We decided to open this office for two major reasons: to get access to high quality software engineering, network operations and tech support folks, and to expand our 24/7 operations and support. ...
04/24/2013
The team at the research firm Sucuri announced a serious vulnerability to W3TC and WP Super Cache this afternoon. (Update: it appears the vulnerability was first reported on WordPress.org about a month ago.)...
04/23/2013
We've had a number of requests for information about what data CloudFlare logs when someone visits a site on our network. While we have provided a Privacy Policy that outlines how we keep information private, I wanted to take the time to clarify our customer log retention policies....
04/11/2013
There is currently a significant attack being launched at a large number of WordPress blogs across the Internet. The attacker is brute force attacking the WordPress administrative portals, using the username "admin" and trying thousands of passwords. ...
04/10/2013
As we wrote about before, we attended Parallels Summit in February where we hosted "Conversations with CloudFlare" - live video interviews with industry experts....
04/08/2013
At CloudFlare, we're always looking for ways to eliminate bottlenecks. We're only able to deal with the very large amount of traffic that we handle because we've built a network that can efficiently handle an extremely high volume of network requests. ...
03/27/2013
The New York Times this morning published a story about the Spamhaus DDoS attack and how CloudFlare helped mitigate it and keep the site online. The Times calls the attack the largest known DDoS attack ever on the Internet....
03/22/2013
Page Rules are powerful tools for controlling how CloudFlare works on your site on a page-by-page basis. Customers customize CloudFlare with Page Rules based on their specific needs....
03/22/2013
Last month we attended Parallels Summit to meet with new and existing partners, and hear from leading experts on the latest industry trends. ...
03/20/2013
At CloudFlare, we deal with large DDoS attacks every day. Usually, these attacks are directed at large companies or organizations that are reluctant to talk about their details. Sometimes a customer is willing to let us tell their story....
03/13/2013
When you think of San Francisco, undoubtedly one bridge in particular comes to mind - The Golden Gate Bridge....
