February 2011 Summaries

Damon Billian attended ForumCon in San Francisco where he learned that forums require real-time comment posting and connection capabilities to maintain a vibrant community. This often leads to challenges with spam, fake accounts, and managing traffic spikes. CloudFlare offers protection against these issues by preventing forum spammers and attackers while ensuring the site stays online during high traffic periods. Before joining CloudFlare, it is recommended to inform the community about the upcoming changes and potential challenge pages they may encounter. After joining, reviewing Top Tips blog post can help with understanding key features and settings. Customizing the CloudFlare challenge page and using Threat Control are also beneficial for maintaining a secure forum environment.

The text discusses various settings available on the Cloudflare 'Settings' page, which can be accessed by going to Your Websites->Settings->Cloudflare Settings. These settings include Basic Security Level, Challenge Page Customization, Development Mode, Purge Cache, Google Analytics, and special settings for Pro accounts such as Advanced Security and Website Preloader. The Basic Security Level allows users to adjust the security setting for their website between High, Medium, and Low. The challenge page can be customized with colors and text. Development mode is useful when making changes to a site's static files. Purge Cache expels all cached resources in a domain's cache. Google Analytics ensures that analytics appear on all pages of the site. Pro accounts have additional settings like Advanced Security, which provides further protection against malicious attacks, and Website Preloader, which improves page loading times for frequently requested static resources.

The guest author runs a small technology firm and writes on their blog, GabeArnold.com, focusing on techniques and technology that help small business owners grow and succeed rapidly and measurably. They discovered CloudFlare through a friend who had been studying content delivery networks (CDNs) to improve page load speeds. The author joined CloudFlare due to its ease of use, performance boost, and protection against attacks. Currently, they have 5 sites on the CloudFlare network and plan to enroll any new sites they run into it. Their favorite feature is the performance boost provided by CloudFlare, along with the dashboard that displays blocked attacks and saved bandwidth. The author recommends new customers to consider CloudFlare's ease of use and lack of risks when making a decision.

On February 2nd, 2011, Groundhog Day saw a massive surge in traffic on the official website of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club (www.groundhog.org). To handle this spike, the club utilized CloudFlare's free service, which successfully kept the site online and responsive despite a server crash. The website received over 2.2 million page views in 24 hours, peaking at nearly 300,000 per hour. Glenn Kelly, who helps administer the site, reported "zero downtime" during this period. Additionally, CloudFlare's global network made the site approximately 40% faster for visitors worldwide.