Today, CloudFlare adds more than 250 new customers every six hours or so, but getting our first 250 took several months and a lot of faith from our earliest adopters. When we started working on CloudFlare, an employee at a major CDN company warned us that we had no idea all the crazy things people did with their websites. He wasn't kidding. For the first sites that signed up, we usually made them slower and offered little additional protection. But, over time, and with the patience of our first users, we incorporated everything we learned from each new site and built something great.
Together We Grow Stronger
The core value proposition of CloudFlare has always been that the system gets smarter and faster with each new website that joins. In that sense, CloudFlare is a community. When an attack is launched against any one site, knowledge about that attack is immediately shared across the rest of the network. Similarly, we use data from the performance of sites on CloudFlare to help tune optimizations for each new site that joins.
Onward and Upward
Today CloudFlare's community is made up of hundreds of thousands of sites, and each new site that joins continues to make the system better. Together we have brought the resources previously reserved only for the Internet giants to the rest of the web, and we've grown into a giant ourselves. We now power more page views per month than Twitter, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, Zynga, AOL, Apple, and Bing — combined. We have big plans for tomorrow and ways we are continuing to work to save the web, but we'll always remember that we couldn't have done it without you.
From the whole CloudFlare team, thank you!
P.S. - Want to have an even bigger impact? We're always hiring and we usually get our best candidates from our existing users.