January 2011 Summaries

On January 29, 2011, Egypt shut down its internet services, resulting in a significant drop in traffic from the country to CloudFlare's network. The event demonstrated both the power and fragility of internet access. The thoughts of the CloudFlare team are with the citizens of Egypt, hoping for a swift resolution to the conflict and a return to normalcy online.

Ruben Orozco, Founder of TweetFind.com, discovered CloudFlare through a TechCrunch post in September 2010. Impressed by the potential improvements to site performance and security, he joined the network and experienced significant page loading time reductions for his website, TweetFind. The ease of setup and exceptional support team were also major highlights for Orozco. His favorite feature is the web analytics provided by CloudFlare's Pro account, which updates every 15 minutes and offers detailed insights into site performance. He recommends new users to try a free account first before upgrading to the affordable $20 per month Pro account for enhanced speed and protection.

On January 19, 2011, Matthew Prince announced the release of two new APIs for web developers to integrate CloudFlare directly into their web applications. These APIs allow users to automate various tasks such as clearing CloudFlare cache, changing security levels, managing IPs and DNS records, reporting visitor stats, and more. The APIs join the existing Hosting Provider API, which is limited to approved hosts. Web developers are encouraged to integrate with these new APIs and provide feedback on desired functionality. Developers who create plugins or other functionalities using the CloudFlare API should inform the company for promotion within the community.

CloudFlare's Threat Control panel provides valuable insights into malicious visitors coming to a website, which may not be visible in Google Analytics. The panel displays various types of threats and their IP addresses, along with the country of origin. High priority alerts are marked with an exclamation point and can be reviewed or blocked by users. Users can also add custom rules to block specific IP addresses, ranges, or countries. Regular review of entries in the Threat Control panel is recommended for identifying false positives and maintaining accurate security settings.

CloudFlare has added customization options for its challenge pages, allowing website owners to modify colors and text to match their site's design. This feature helps protect websites from malicious attacks by presenting a CAPTCHA challenge page to visitors with potentially compromised computers. The challenge page also educates users about potential infections on their devices. In the future, CloudFlare plans to internationalize the challenge pages so that text appears in the language of the visitor.

On January 1st, 2011, Matthew Prince announced that Cloudflare received a new IP address range which will be implemented soon. The updated public facing IPs are now 204.93.240.0/24, 204.93.177.0/24, 199.27.128.0/21, and 173.245.48.0/20. Users are advised to update their IP filtering settings accordingly. Additionally, Prince wished the Cloudflare community a Happy New Year and hinted at significant network expansion in 2011.