What we’re most excited about today is that over the past six years, we’ve made the Internet safer, faster and a more reliable place for any domain whether it’s used for a website, web application or API.

We currently count more than 4,000,000 customers as members of the Cloudflare community, and we’ve been working very hard to bring the best of the modern Internet to you.

Levelling the Internet playing field is Cloudflare’s mission and it’s what gets us out of bed every morning and into one of our offices. Last week, we took away what we think are the last excuses for any domain to not be encrypted with our three launches during Encryption Week.

Yesterday, we announced the 100th city added to the Cloudflare global network of data centers. In the coming days, we have more exciting products that we’re opening up to the public for early access that will expand our offering to customers who want easy to manage dedicated SSL certificates, cloud based global load balancing, or intelligent traffic management for protection against unwanted traffic spikes.

And today, we’re launching a new brand and new marketing website.

In the face of the other news, a new brand seems almost frivolous, especially when what we care about the most is our customers, the future of the Internet, and the employees here who help build Cloudflare every day.

But, we wanted to follow our own advice: never stick with something just because it feels comfortable, or because it’s a lot of hard work to change it. The Internet is constantly changing, technology is constantly evolving, and we felt that the smart, hard work that our team has been doing since 2010 deserved to have a signal to the world that their work is evolving too.

So we redesigned our logo, we updated our typography, and we changed what had become a pesky capital “F” in the middle of our name. All to be more streamlined, more scalable, and, we hope, more appealing.

One of our guiding principles in refreshing the brand and the homepage video was, to be frank, don’t screw up something good. More than 5.6 million people have viewed our previous homepage video which taught people that they could easily “Supercharge their websites.” But when we launched in 2010, we had 1,000 beta users and 2 data centers. So Ninjas, Kitten videos, and lasers were fun and felt like the right things to reference for our community of webmasters. Yes, webmasters.

Since then, we’ve signed up not just bloggers, but financial institutions, Fortune 500 companies, and some of the most rapidly growing companies on the planet. And we’re way beyond webmasters, as is the Internet. What was the web is now apps running on smartphones, mobile optimized websites, and machine-to-machine communication.

So we needed to show the scale breadth of everything that we’re doing today, and where our business is heading in the future. We’re industrial grade infrastructure! We have servers running in 100 cities on every continent but Antarctica! But we’re still as open, and engaged with our community as we were back in 2010.

Our old logo did a lot of great things: it stood out and reflected our company’s personality. Cloud logos have become much more common as more companies have launched as cloud native. So we needed our new logo to continue to be recognizable and a strong symbol of our company.

Our old logo also had a lot of complexity, which made it really hard to reproduce on t-shirts, signs, stickers, and anything else we wanted to use it for. We ended up making a flat version of it, but our design team was never satisfied with the end result.

So our new logo did two things: We kept our “Cloudflare orange and yellow” and we kept a flare in the center of it, to represent how our network responds to things in real-time in such a powerful way. We also kept the essential shapes of the cloud from our previous logo. This was our way of keeping what was good about the old logo, while updating what needed to be fixed. And that 2.0 thinking is what pushed our other redesign elements too.

Also, we looked at the typeface, where, while our founders were still in business school, the entire name was capitalized in letters that were blocky, but with rounded edges. The typeface was strong, and felt a bit reminiscent of technology, but our long name made it difficult to read. So the “C” and the “F” were made slightly larger. Today we say goodbye to the capital “F” in CloudFlare and hello to “Cloudflare.” Cloudflare has always been a single word name, and this will help to alleviate confusion. Thanks to all of the journalists who got it right for us all these years. We really appreciate it!

A lot of what we do on the marketing team at Cloudflare is explain how aspects of the Internet work and how we make them better. That calls for icons and glyphs that make up diagrams. Lots and lots of diagrams.

As it turns out, drawing diagrams of how different protocols work can be pretty intricate, and our previous style and color palette was mostly made of very bold colors and geometric styles. These were fun and approachable, but they made doing work that showed a level of nuance or dynamic movement very difficult, so we looked at a palette that would still maintain our personality, while allowing us to demonstrate how, say, content gets cached at our edge, and served up to visitors from one of our closest data centers.

Cloudflare’s brand will continue to evolve and change, but we’re proud of the work that our team has done.

If helping to build the next part of Cloudflare’s future sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring.

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.

When someone signs up for CloudFlare, we give them two domains for their name servers. For example:

• bob.ns.cloudflare.com

• lola.ns.cloudflare.com

So who are Bob and Lola? To understand, you have to understand a bit about a problem we were trying to solve.

We worked to make the sign-up process for CloudFlare as easy as possible. Typically, it takes users about 5 minutes to complete. Imagine you own example.com and want to sign up. You enter example.com on our sign-up form, we slurp your DNS records and allow you to add any we've missed, then we give you your two name servers that you enter at your registrar.

We have systems that almost instantly push your records to our DNS servers at the edge of CloudFlare's network. As a result, when you switch to our name servers at your registrar, your site will be served as normal without any downtime. In most cases, this is all easy. One problem we worried about early on was simply: what would happen if two people signed up the same domain at the same time?

Imagine two people sign up example.com at the same time. We now have two sets of DNS records and it's not clear which one is accurate. We needed a clear way to tell which record is authoritative. What we needed was a way to embed a code in the name server names themselves so that, when we saw the first DNS request on our network, we could test what name servers domains were authoritative for the domain and return the correct DNS records.

In the first iteration of CloudFlare's signup process, the name server names were in a relatively standard format:

• dns1.cloudflare.com

• dns2.cloudflare.com

• Etc…

We would pair those together to create a unique combination. If Alex signed up example.com he may get dns7.cloudflare.com and dns23.cloudflare.com. If Betty then signed up example.com then she may get dns3.cloudflare.com and dns84.cloudflare.com. When we received our first DNS request for example.com then we'd test what name servers were actually entered at the registrar. Assuming it was dns3 and dns84, then Betty's sign up would be considered valid and the DNS records she entered would become authoritative.

What we found was that a lot of people saw these DNS domain names and tried to be clever. While it may seem that the two domain names only point to two physical servers, in fact they reference potentially hundreds of servers running in all of our global data centers. While we tried to explain that adding more domains wouldn't actually result in your queries being served by any more name servers, we found users tried anyway. Betty may have received dns3 and dns84, but we found sometimes she'd try and enter dns3, dns4, dns5, dns6, and so on. Not only did this not actually add any benefit, it would cause our verification to fail.

Our solution was to come up with domain names where the sequence wasn't obvious. We spent an afternoon generating a list of one hundred common 2- to 4-letter names, like Bob and Lola. We then used them to create the domain names we handed out at signup. Initially there were 50 boys names and 50 girls names. Everyone who signs up gets one of each, allowing for 2,500 unique combinations.

One side note on this point: we once had someone write in to support criticizing us based on the fact that our name server convention is hetro-normative. I will simply say that just because you get two name servers doesn't mean they're in any kind of relationship. I do, however, believe that diversity in the workplace is a good thing.

To add some personality to the name servers we commissioned an artist to draw representations of the 100 name servers as if they were ninjas. While we've never done much with the drawings, we liked the metaphor of two ninja name servers protecting your website. As a perk, we allowed some of CloudFlare's early team members (e.g., Lee Holloway & Ian Pye), investors (e.g., Ray Rothrock & Carl Ledbetter), and even Sam Coates, our corporate counsel, to pick the representations of their namesake ninjas.

One of the drawings featured a smiling ninja on a Segway. It immediately reminded us of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who lived not far from our office which was at the time in Palo Alto, California. It wasn't uncommon to see Steve, who was affectionately known as Woz, scooting around town on his Segway. I'd been a fan of Woz since I was a kid, having learned to program on an Apple GS. When I was 7 and graduated from that to a limited edition, Wozniak-signed Apple.

While it wasn't a name on our original list of 100, when we saw the ninja on the Segway it was obvious we needed to include "Woz." We'd already put the 100 name server names into production, so we couldn't just eliminate Bill to make room. So we appended a 101st name (51 boys, 50 girls). As of today, there are 13,899 CloudFlare customers who have Woz as one of their name server domains.

Given the 51 boy name server names and the 50 girl name server names, we have 2,550 unique combinations. This has been more than enough to ensure that the correct DNS records are pushed to our network, even when two people attempt to sign up the same domain.

Once the verification step is complete, the names of the name servers lose their technical importance. The servers in CloudFlare's infrastructure are configured to be able to respond to any request for any one of our customers. This allows us to granularly load balance across our entire infrastructure. While we typically provide just two domain names, in fact they reference many servers running across CloudFlare's network of 23 data centers distributed around the world. While you may get Bob and Lola, and someone else may get Stan and Amy, in fact they are both sending requests to the same elastic pool of resources.

This flexibility has allowed us to build one of the fastest, most robust Authoritative DNS networks in the world. And, while the names may have seemed like just a cute addition, like most things we do, there was actually a good, technical reason for why we did what we did.

Debugging technical issues online can be tricky. There are many moving pieces; it can be an isolated network connection with the ISP, an issue with your server or one of Cloudflare's data centers could be temporarily having a problem. We wanted to share some tips on how to troubleshoot website issues and provide some good techniques to prevent site issues in the future.

If you can't get to your website and you see a cached copy of your website or a "Your Website is Unavailable" error page, the first thing to do is to check if your server is having issues.

For Mac Users:Open the application called terminal on your Mac, and run the following curl command to see if your server is responding:

curl -v -A firefox/4.0 -H 'Host: yourdomain.com' YourServerIP

--> YourServerIP: You can get the IP for your server origin by checking your DNS Settings page on your Cloudflare account. It will look something like 192.73.146.94

• CURL for Windows

• CURL for Linux

When you press enter, you'll get an output message.

If you get an error message like "can't connect to host" or "500 internal server error", then this means that your server is not responding. You should contact your hosting provider and work with them to resolve the server issue.

If you get HTML returned, but you still get a site offline or unavailable message from Cloudflare, then this means that connections fromCloudflare's IPs are being restricted or blocked at either the hosting provider or server level. Please make sure that the CloudFlare IP addresses are allowlisted on your server and with your host.

Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy. As a result, you can still access cPanel or use FTP, but you will have to do so a little differently. To access cPanel or FTP:

• Accessing cPanel with Cloudflare

• Using FTP with Cloudflare

Cloudflare has two beta features that speed up the loading of your web pages, but they can sometimes cause issues.

Rocket LoaderRocket Loader can potentially impact JavaScript calls on your site, including things that potentially use jQuery. For example, if you see an ad widget breaking, it is possible that Rocket Loader is breaking the JavaScript and you should turn this feature off by going to your Cloudflare Settings page.

If you want to keep Rocket Loader turned on for the performance boosts, you can make some edits for the service to ignore certain scripts on your site.

Note: Rocket Loader is defaulted to off upon signup. Once you turn it on or off, the change takes less than 3 minutes to take effect.

Auto MinifyAuto Minify rarely impacts CSS and JavaScript. However, Auto Minify can sometimes cause issues if you already have another minification service turned on. We recommend that you only have one minify option turned on for your website.

If you're making changes to the static content Cloudflare caches on your site, including changes to JavaScript, CSS or images, it can be very easy to forget that you need to turn Cloudflare Development Mode on to bypass our cache so these changes appear immediately.If you forgot to turn on Development Mode when making the changes, you can always purge your Cloudflare cache to have these changes appear immediately. Just a reminder that by purging the cache for your website, there will be a performance impact for a couple of hours.

The most important step you can take is to make sure that your server or hosting provider has the Cloudflare IP ranges allowlisted. If any attempts to connect to your site are blocked or limited in any way, this could create connectivity issues to your site for some of your visitors.Another very important step you can take is to install mod_cloudflare (which is an Apache module) on your server. mod_cloudflare will restore the original visitor IP back to your server logs, and is also a good way to reduce the probability that your hosting provider will limit connections from CloudFlare's IPs. If you are not using Apache, we have a list of solutions for nginx, Windows and others in the CloudFlare Support Forums.

Cloudflare runs 14 data centers around the world. Sometimes issues arise at one of our data centers, and we deal with these quickly (on average, in less than 10 minutes). Only visitors in that geographic region are affected.

• We make all announcements on CloudFlare's System Status Twitter handle.

• If you do not use Twitter, you can also follow updates on the Cloudflare system status page.

1. Check to make sure your server is online (see instructions on to do this above)

2. If your server is online, make sure Cloudflare's IPs are not being blocked

3. If your server is online and Cloudflare's IP are not being blocked, send us the report here. In your email, include:i) Your websiteii) Where the visitor is geographically located (Issues are almost always isolated to one of our data centers. By knowing where they are located, we can investigate much quicker)iii) A description of the error page they are seeingiv) The output of a traceroute (if possible)

4. Temporarily deactivate Cloudflare for your website by choosing‘Deactivate' from your Cloudlare control panel. Choosing deactivate means that CloudFlare will continue to resolve DNS for your website, but none of your traffic will pass through our performance and security network. If it is a CloudFlare issue, this will immediately resolve the problem and our team can investigate the report. Once we've identified what is wrong, you will easily be able to reactivate CloudFlare. Note: You do not need to change your name servers.

I hope these tips help you troubleshoot some of the common issues users have on Cloudlare. Please let us know if there are any other areas of confusion that we can address in either our help section or in another Cloudflare blog post.

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. According to Wolfram Alpha, it's the equivalent of all the data on the Internet Archive circa 2006, 1/46th of the "deep Internet" today, or the total estimated storage of an average human brain.

We're continuing to save users almost a gigabyte of data a second. You can watch the savings tick up on our network map. Pretty incredible when you compare us against services that charge by the byte.

If you're on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google AppEngine or another host that charges you for bandwidth, CloudFlare won't just make your site faster, it will do so while actually saving you money. In other words, CloudFlare's basic service isn't just free, it's less than free.

We know first hand that running a forum isn't easy. I've run Vbulletin forums in the past. In addition to managing the community, I had to contend with things like spam, malicious attacks and large floods of traffic on a daily basis.

Since CloudFlare offers a protection against forum spammers and attackers and helps your forum stay online even with traffic spikes, I wanted to share some CloudFlare best practices for forum owners.

Before you activate CloudFlare, we recommend that you make an announcement to your community. Some topics to include:

• You're going to be trying a service called CloudFlare to protect and speed up your forums, which should improve page loading times and sharply reduce the number of active spammers.

• Advise your members that they may get a challenge page before they are granted access to the site. Let them know that they can still access the forum by passing the captcha, and that they can send you a message through the challenge page to request allowlisting of their IP address. Only a small number of your forum members will see the challenge page, but it is always useful to let them know what to expect. (On a side note, the intermittent page is used to stop automated bots from accesing your site).

• Let the community members know that the challenge page will appear if there are indications that their machine is infected with a computer virus or malware. The best thing to do is to run an anti-virus scan on their machine as a precaution.

• Let your members know that sometimes there are false positives with the data, but it is most common when the visitor is coming from a shared network like an office, college network or coffee shop. What this means is that although their computer isn't infected, someone else on the same network does have an issue. Your community member should run an anti-virus scan as a precaution. If there is no virus or malware, then they can enter the CAPTCHA to access the forum. The data set will refine over time.

We recommend reviewing the the following Top Tips blog post:Top tips after joining CloudFlareWhy: The tips include solutions for getting original visitor IP, including mod_cloudflare which is for Apache, while also reviewing many key CloudFlare features and settings. If you're looking for other solutions beyond Apache, CloudFlare community members have created options for getting visitor IP for Vbulletin forums, PHPbb forums & other platforms.

Customizing your CloudFlare challenge pageWhy: You can customize the look of the challenge page to match your overall brand aesthetic and customize the text to match your writing style.

Using CloudFlare Threat ControlWhy: Challenged visitors may leave a message for you in your threat control panel requesting IP allowlisting. In addition, you can use the threat control panel to add known IPs, IP ranges, or countries that you want to either block from or trust accessing your forum.

How CloudFlare stops forum and blog spammersAre there any other forum platforms that you use in which we should know about? Please let us know in the comments. Also, if you've created a solution and want to share it back to the CloudFlare community, add it to our Wiki.

You can get to your CloudFlare Settings by going to:

Your Websites->Settings->CloudFlare Settings

Given that each domain you register on CloudFlare may have different uses or security needs, CloudFlare settings are available on a domain by domain basis.

CloudFlare lets you adjust the security setting for your website between High, Medium and Low. CloudFlare protects your website from malicious attacks by stopping the request before it reaches your server. Often these requests are from automated bots crawling your website looking for a vulnerability. Sometimes, the threat is a web surfer whose computer has been compromised with a virus or malware and the web surfer is unknowingly spreading viruses online. In these situations, the web surfer visiting a CloudFlare protected website is presented with a challenge page asking them to enter a CAPTCHA to prove they are human.

The challenge page also educates the visitor that their computer may be infected. This helps to clean up the number of infected computers online, ultimately making the web a better place. The security setting determines which visitors are challenged based on their associated threat score.

Note: Threat Level scores are based on a logarithmic scale, not category, so threat types like spammer and exploit attacker could have similar scores.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5391625276/ "CloudFlare Captcha Page by dbillian, on Flickr")

Related to the ‘Security Settings', you can change the look and feel of your challenge pagethat is presented to your challenged visitors. Website owners can customize the colors on the page to match their website and the text that is displayed.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5391020267/ "CloudFlare Development Mode by dbillian, on Flickr")

If you know that you have to make a number of changes to the cachable content on your site (images, CSS, javascript, etc.), we recommend going to ‘Development Mode' before making these changes. Going to ‘Development Mode' will bypass CloudFlare so any site changes to static files are reflected immediately.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5391020249/ "CloudFlare Purge Cache by dbillian, on Flickr")

If you want to have CloudFlare fetch a new version of your site's cachable content, Purge Cache will expire all the cached resources that CloudFlare has in your domain's cache. Please note that doing so means that it will take several days for a new cache to build.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5391020231/ "CloudFlare Google Analytics by dbillian, on Flickr")

CloudFlare can make sure that Google Analytics is appearing on all of your site's pages, which helps improve the accuracy of your analytics. Adding the Google Analytics' code will also make sure you're always working off of the most recent version.

CloudFlare Pro accounts have two additional options available on the settings' page, which are:

Advanced security is a WAF (Web Application Firewall) that helps further protect your site from malicious attacks. Similar to the Basic Security Level, you can change the strength of the protection to low or high.

[Note: The website preloader was discontinued in June 2014.] The website preloader is astronger caching option to help improve the page loading times for your most requested static resources for subsequent page loads. You would only want to turn this feature off if you didn't want javascript to run.

Also see: Top Tips after joining CloudFlare