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. We'd chosen PowerDNS four years ago for several reasons: 1) it was reasonably fast as an authoritative
What's the story behind the names of CloudFlare's name servers?
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. Two Names Enter When someone signs up for CloudFlare, we
Good Web Security News: Open DNS Resolvers Are Getting Closed
This has been a rough week in the security industry with big attacks and compromises reported at companies from Facebook to Apple. We're therefore happy to end the week with some good news: the web's open resolvers, one of the sources of the biggest DDoS attacks,
CloudFlare: Fastest Free DNS, Among Fastest DNS Period
CloudFlare runs one of the largest networks of DNS servers in the world. Over the last few months, we've invested in making our DNS as fast and responsive as possible. We were happy to see these efforts pay off in third-party DNS test results. The good folks at
How to Launch a 65Gbps DDoS, and How to Stop One
Yesterday I posted a post mortem on an outage we had Saturday. The outage was caused when we applied an overly aggressive rate limit to traffic on our network while battling a determined DDoS attacker. In the process of writing it I mentioned that we'd seen a 65Gbps
CloudFlare (aka. KickassDNS)
One of the things we don't talk about much at CloudFlare is how we've built one of the largest, fastest, easiest, and most resilient authoritative DNS networks in the world. A report from SolveDNS was just released that shows CloudFlare as the second fastest authoritative DNS
