The San Francisco MarathonThe San Francisco Marathon is a popular race. With 24,000 runners competing in five events, the San Francisco Marathon has runners of all ages, from all over the globe. The website is used for registration, to organize runners during the actual event weekend and to track each runners race time.

"I really love how simple it was to set up and use. CloudFlare is an easy to use CDN service with offerings at all levels," said said Laura Baalman, an independent IT consultant to the San Francisco Marathon website. "I would recommend anyone with a website, especially those that get big changes in traffic, to give it a try."

Read full case study here.

StorifyStorify helps its users tell stories by curating social media. Storify sees huge spikes of traffic during major events around the world, like Hurricane Sandy or the U.S. presidential election.

"Thanks to services like CloudFlare, we can scale Storify to more than 24 million story views per month with only 3 engineers," said Xavier Damman, co-founder and CEO of Storify.

During Hurricane Sandy, CloudFlare saved Storify more than 75 million requests and over 470 GB of bandwidth.

"Having CloudFlare save these requests has enabled us to stay online and keep up with the surges in traffic due to significant news sharing during Hurricane Sandy," said Xavier.

Read full blog post here.

Runa TeaRuna produces guayusa tea sourced from the Ecuadorian Amazon. Guayusa balances as much caffeine as one cup of coffee with twice the antioxidants of green tea creating. The drink has gained popularity around the world, including among the CloudFlare team. It is always well-stocked in our kitchen.

"We love CloudFlare and recommend it to anyone looking for amazingresults," said Anna Premo Director of Marketing at Runa.

seo.comSeo.com is an experienced search marketing firm dedicated to making websites more visible online and profitable.

"I've been using CloudFlare for over a year now. I had a personal website which began to see significant traffic and I was really having server load issues. In addition, the site had been hacked twice. Because of that, security and scalability was important to me," said Derek Perkins, VP of Technology at SEO.com. "I tried CloudFlare on that website and I now have it on 30 other sites, including seo.com. I have yet to have any of those sites compromised, which has been fantastic."

ZopimZopim is an award winning, cloud based live chat platform that makes it easy for businesses to deliver fast customer service online. Businesses who sign up with Zopim are fanatics when it comes to delivering customer wow. More than 50,000 businesses use Zopim Live Chat to chat with their online customers everyday. Zopim is based in Singapore.

"Thanks to CloudFlare's CDN, our chat widget began loading extremely fast no matter where it was being loaded from," said Qing. "By caching and serving the static images on our widget, CloudFlare accelerated the byte load and reduced the widget loading time by at least 50%. Even our customers could feel the significant improvement in speed."

Read full case study here.

Ekaterina DokuchaevaEkaterina Dokuchaeva is a talented photographer from Russia with her own unique style and creativity. Despite the fact that Ekaterina is just 21 years old, she has already done exquisite art creations and continues to work hard in the photo-industry.

"There's an introduction song playing on the backround of the landing page. This song made page load speed very slow and visitors constantly complained that the site was not fast enough," said Dokuchaev Konstantin, who manages the site. "Once I enabled CloudFlare's CDN and compression features to our website, the page load time immediately reduced to three seconds in all browsers. It was great solution of our problem. I wasn't expecting such a noticable change!"

Do you have a story you'd like to share about CloudFlare? I'd like to hear it and feature you on our blog! testimonials@cloudflare.com

With Halloween around the corner, I caught up with one of our customers, the husband and wife team behind Pumpkinlady.com. If you haven't been to their website, it offers a range of pumpkin carving stencils and accessories for the holiday season. The website has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years. Lisa Berberette (aka, The Pumpkin Lady) has been featured on Good Morning America and the Home Shopping Network, not to mention she's carved pumpkins for Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. I sat down with Jack Berberette (aka, The Pumpkin Hubby) to talk about their business and what it's like to run a seasonal website.

CF: How long have you been running the website pumpkinlady.com?JB: This is our 15th season! In 1998 we noticed that there really weren't a lot downloadable carving patterns on the web, so Lisa created a bunch of patterns and I designed the site as a place for people to grab some cool freebies. We had no idea that the site would take off the way it did.

CF: What are some of the perks of running a seasonal website? What are some of the challenges?JB: Running a seasonal site is cool in that it's easy to focus on a particular niche and we can relax a bit outside of the busy season. The downside is that we only have a three month income window. We're in the process now of working on a non-seasonal specific line of artwork that will hopefully fill in the nine month gap.

CF: Is there anything you do to prepare your website for the busy holiday season?JB: Over the years, more and more pumpkin carving sites have popped up. Now competition is a good thing, but it does present search engine ranking challenges (this past year even more so with Google's algorithm change). So, in March I started researching Google "ranking rules" and how we fit in compared to our competitors....from there I started making measured tweaks to optimize SEO.

Aside from search engine ranking, running a high volume, seasonal Wordpress site has presented some interesting challenges. I am constantly looking for ways to reduce CPU usage, database calls and bandwidth. From custom code tweaks in the e-commerce backend, optimizing caching to CDN, there is quite a bit to prepare for each year. But I'm a nerd and like that sort of thing.

CF: What advice would you give to other small businesses running a seasonal site?JB: Content generation for a seasonal site is easy, creating a great visitor experience is the challenge. Seasonal sites, by their very nature, are highly competitive. "Big Box" sites have huge budgets to hone in on that market. So, to set yourself apart, make sure that your visitors feel that they are the single most important thing that has ever happened to your business. It doesn't matter if they don't purchase anything, only spend a buck or place a huge order...the customer wants to know that you care about them and their experience they had on your site. If you can convey this type of conviction, you will definitely have an edge over the world of auto-responders and canned replies.

CF: Any tips or tricks you'd like to share on using CloudFlare?JB: Yes...don't ever stop using it, and if you aren't using CloudFlare, start right now! As far as tips go, I pretty much use the defaultsettings as I have found that these work best with our site and its plugins. I do recommend activating the Google Analytics settings.

In his own words...Without a doubt, the single most significant performance and security enhancement our site has ever experienced has been the incredible impact CloudFlare has made. In just the past 30 days, CloudFlare has saved our site from over 21 million requests and over 200GB of bandwidth. Knowing that CloudFlare has my back with great support, resource savings and enhanced site security makes my job as a site owner so much easier. If you aren't using this incredible service, then you are missing out on something great.

~ Jack Berberette (www.pumpkinlady.com)

So, when the management team at Khataland.com got the call that Jill Martin was going to feature one of their products in the Steals & Deals promotion on Tuesday, January 24, they were excited. And then they got to work.[

](http://www.khataland.com/)

NBC editors tell featured companies to expect up to 100,000 hits in the span of a few minutes after the TV segment airs, with follow-on spikes as the show airs in each successive time zone. So the team at Khataland got in touch with CoreCommerce, who runs their online store, and made some plans to handle the expected surge.

Those plans quickly involved CloudFlare.

CloudFlare works in cooperation with any webserver or platform to make sure websites are safe, fast, and available. There's no relationship required between CloudFlare and your host, but it doesn't hurt that CloudFlare and CoreCommerce serve several customers together. For instance, earlier this month, Benderbound enjoyed the combination to make sure their site was fast and available during a smaller TODAY Show appearance.

So, when Khataland asked CoreCommerce for help, they recommended CloudFlare.

Here's how Brandon Wanamaker, from the quality assurance team, put it:

We always do our best to provide top-tier service to our customers at the product and customer experience levels. CloudFlare allows us to multiply our efforts to speed up the software; reduces the merchant's expense by absorbing a very large majority of bandwidth usage; and protects higher profile, or otherwise unfortunate, targets of a denial of service attack and other malicious traffic. The more merchants on our system using CloudFlare, the faster and safer the CoreCommerce system is. Shoppers are less likely to abandon their shopping carts on a faster site. Merchants avoid huge bandwidth usage and possibly overages. Finally, it makes our lives a little easier when the system is running smoothly. It's changed how we handle stores featured on a national TV broadcast, with potential surge in traffic. We insist on CloudFlare to keep their stores and CoreCommerce running quickly, with no hiccups. With such huge exposure, downtime is not an option, and in every case, CloudFlare has never failed. And the setup is way too simple for something that does so much. Registration, a few clicks and you're done! I can't say enough good things about the experience the CoreCommerce team and our merchants have had working with CloudFlare.

The team at Khataland signed up for CloudFlare directly, changed their nameservers, and ordered CloudFlare Pro to secure transactions with Full SSL. Everything was in place in under an hour, letting the Khataland and CoreCommerce team focus on other preparations for making a whole bunch of brand-new customers happy.

Here's what Khataland shared:

We had huge interest from Today Show viewers. In the first hour after the show, we had more than 60,000 views and sold more than half of our special packages for the show. Our website remained up and functioning during this huge spike.

See the spike for yourself, starting in the largest viewership (Eastern Time) with each time zone providing another bump an hour later.

Brandon on the CoreCommerce team tweeted about the resources saved.

Here's a more graphical view from the CloudFlare dashboard, showing thesavings.

Surges in traffic come for many reasons beyond TV promotion, from the Halloween holiday, a pre-Christmas sale, or simply Groundhog Day (next week!). CloudFlare's ability to deliver information quickly to your visitors without overloading your webserver becomes dramatically important during these surges.

But a fast, always available, secure website is important every day, so sign up for CloudFlare now.

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5576915675/ "Metallica Logo by dbillian, on Flickr")

While I may be dating myself in this post, I've been a fan of Metallica since 1986. Like many other teenagers listening to music during my youth, I was largely listening to a lot of cheesy "hair bands" during High School (ummm...1980's) and didn't really appreciate the thrash metal bands that were around.

Then Metallica came along and blew my mind; their virtuosity, heavy (yet melodic) sound, and interesting timeshifts from their rhythm section opened me to a whole new world of rock music that changed what rock music would become. Other than perhaps the mighty Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I can think of no other heavy metal band that influenced so many of the bands of the past thirty years or so.

The first time I saw Metallica live was on their 'And Justice for All' tour, playing with the band Queensryche at the Cow Palace in 1988. Metallica and Queensryche were my two favorite bands, so it was a dream come true, and I even had the fortune of going backstage after the show. Rich and famous? Yes. Approachable and cool? Totally. It was definitely a highlight of my teenage years to meet the band members I had idolized.

The last time I saw Metallica was at a private show at the Fillmore in San Francisco, fifteen years later in 2003. While time is generally not kind to rock bands, Metallica was still as tight a band as they were when I first saw them live fifteen years earlier and rocked the house like few bands can.

Fast forward to 2011...

A few weeks ago, Metallica signed up for the CloudFlare service. I reached out to the network admin to find out why Metallica decided to use CloudFlare, and the response is below:

As Metallica's technical consultants and an existing user of CloudFlare, we didn't hesitate to recommend your service to not only add a layer of security to the Metallica website and message boards but also to help reduce the load on their servers. In addition, Metallica's worldwide fan base benefits from the distributed content to speed up load times in countries where their site would normally take longer to load. Once these benefits were explained to Metallica's web management, the decision was easy.

CloudFlare is super excited to have Metallica join us, and our goal is to make all of Metallica's fans happy by making the Metallica site as fast as Metallica's music.

Tell me about yourself

I run a small technology firm and write on my blog GabeArnold.com I focus on techniques and technology that help small business owners grow and succeed in a rapid and measurable manner. CloudFlare meets my criteria as a reliable tool for small business owners and freelancers.

I heard about CloudFlare from my friend Lane Campbell. He has been studying CDN's and ways to improve page load speeds since around the time Google changed to their instant search algorithm.

After seeing the page load performance and blocked attacks that Lane showed me from one of the sites he had enrolled I decided to try it after a few weeks. I ended up joining one day because after reviewing what it takes to put a site in CloudFlare it was so simple that it literally took 5 minutes. Basically all a user has to do is change their name server records. I also like knowing that attacks have been blocked from my sites. Using a CMS like Wordpress for many of my projects presents a general security risk, so having my sites protected at another layer gives me peace of mind.

One of the other reasons I joined CloudFlare was because I had to find a service that helped me start out my projects on an affordable hosting service and grow from there. CloudFlare has allowed me to use budget hosts while conceptualizing a site or project. CloudFlare's performance boost makes it look like I am running a dedicated server instead of justa shared hosting account.

Right now I have 5 sites, and I load all my new project sites into CloudFlare. In most cases even when I have the site under development I will load it into CloudfFlare at the beginning.

My goal is to put any new sites I run into CloudFlare. For me the process of setting up a new website is a three step process and goes like this:

1. Buy a domain

2. Setup hosting

3. Enroll in CloudFlare

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5406179178/ "zigzap 1 by dbillian, on Flickr")

Honestly, the ease of enrolling the sites was so much easier than I expected. 99% of the time it will be as simple as typing in your domain name, clicking "Add this website" and then updating your name servers at the domain level. It really takes 5 minutes, and the performance makes all the difference in the world.

I like the performance boost that my sites get. That is probably the first thing that I realize when enrolling a new site. The other piece that I enjoy is the dashboard that shows stats with blocked attacks and saved bandwidth:

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5406180622/ "zigzap2 by dbillian, on Flickr")

There are two things that I think make a big difference when I recommend a new service:

First - will it be easy?

The answer with CloudFlare is YES! It's incredibly easy to use. You don't have to be an uber-nerd to handle this one.

Second, are there any risks?

No, everything happens seamlessly and there there is no downtime for the site. You can enroll immediately and see results as soon as DNS updatesacross the Internet.

I personally love using CloudFlare and I would be happy to share my experience or answer any other questions you may have. Just contact me with any questions you may have.

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5368004235/ "CloudFlare Tweet Find by dbillian, on Flickr")

My name is Ruben Orozco, and I'm the Founder of Tweetfind.com. When I'm not working on @TweetFind.com, a Twitter directory to bring Consumers and Businesses together, I work as a Computer Administrator for a High School in Santa Barbara, CA.

I heard about CloudFlare from a September 2010 Post on TechCrunch when CloudFlare launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. The post mentioned how you can activate CloudFlare for your website in five minutes.

From everything that I read, CloudFlare sounded really good. The articles said CloudFlare can have a big impact on improving your siteperformance instantly including faster page loading times, while also getting some website security features to your site.

I have hooked up TweetFind, which is my largest website, and plan on connecting the rest of my sites in 2011.

I have seen tremendous improvements with TweetFind. My analytics shows that I've shaved approximately 2 seconds off of my page loading time since joining CloudFlare. A few days after I joined CloudFlare, a number of my regular visitors emailed me to let me know that the site loaded much faster. Seeing all these positive results, I opted for the Pro account for only $20 per month, which is a great bargain.

One of my biggest surprises is how easy it is to get up and running on CloudFlare. The process to add a domain and change my name servers only took me about five minutes.

One of my favorite things about CloudFlare has been the support. Support has been very speedy from day one. The CloudFlare support team has been the best I've seen in my 20+ years in the computer industry.[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5368614258/ "Tweetfind CloudFlare Analytics by dbillian, on Flickr")If I have to pick one feature of CloudFlare that I enjoy the most, I would say the web analytics would be my favorite because Pro accounts update every 15 minutes. The analytics are easy to understand, let me capture other information that other web analytics programs don't, and let me see how much bandwidth I'm saving by using CloudFlare.

New users should try a free account first to see the benefits of beingpart of the CloudFlare community. Once new customers see the analyticsand benefits after a few days, they will see how the $20.00 per monthPro account is a bargain for more speed and protection.