December 2010 Summaries

Damon Billian provides a guide for new Cloudflare users after activating the service. The key points include checking DNS records, familiarizing oneself with the Cloudflare Settings page, installing mod_cloudflare to get original visitor IPs, allowing Cloudflare's IP addresses, bookmarking their status page, and understanding the differences between Pro and Free services.

CloudFlare has upgraded its core logging infrastructure to improve the speed of displaying log data on their stats page. They faced an I/O bottleneck with some queries, leading them to partner with Fusion-IO for a short-term solution. The company moved parts of the stats database onto Fusion-IO cards, which resulted in faster performance and reduced downtime. CloudFlare plans to evaluate the long-term potential of incorporating Fusion-IO more broadly into their core storage architecture.

CloudFlare is a service that helps improve website performance by routing traffic through its network, which is distributed globally. This enables faster delivery of content to visitors as resources are cached at CloudFlare's nodes and served from the closest node to the visitor. The core service is free and accessible to any website with a domain name. Dynamic websites can also benefit from CloudFlare's intelligent caching system, which ensures that dynamic content remains fresh while larger images, CSS, and JavaScript are cached for faster delivery.

Liew Cheon Fong, a tech blogger from Malaysia, experienced frequent server crashes due to malicious traffic on his website www.liewcf.com. After considering migration to a high-end secured web hosting company, he discovered CloudFlare, a service that mitigates problems with malicious traffic and other service outages. Upon setting up CloudFlare, Liew's server load dropped rapidly, and his page loads became approximately 73% faster. He also experienced a 38% reduction in bandwidth costs. Liew highly recommends CloudFlare for websites suffering from high server load or issues with malicious traffic, as it offers free protection and increased site performance.

Matthew Prince, a fellow startup founder, empathizes with Tumblr's recent downtime challenges and highlights CloudFlare's "Always Online" feature as an insurance-like solution for websites. This service builds a cached copy of the site using search engine crawlers to keep basic content available during unexpected outages. Although it cannot fully support dynamic features like shopping carts, it ensures that customers can still access the website and search engines continue indexing. CloudFlare aims to make such outages a thing of the past by partnering with platform providers to bring this feature to more sites.

Steve Nims, a recent graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology's E. Philip Saunders College of Business, shares his experience with CloudFlare as part of his start-up that builds and hosts websites for small and medium sized businesses/NPOs. He highlights how CloudFlare has helped their clients save money by using free and open source solutions like Joomla! and WordPress. Additionally, it has accelerated their client's websites considerably, saving 10.3 days of visitor's browsing time, reducing bandwidth usage by 29.9 GB, and decreasing average page load time from 2.03 seconds to 1.2 seconds. Nims also appreciates the development mode feature that allows him to see immediate updates while working on websites. He recommends CloudFlare's Pro service plan for those needing extra security or planning to run an e-commerce website.