December 2011 Summaries

In 2011, there was a significant increase in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, with a 700% rise noted by CloudFlare. These attacks can be categorized into two main types: political and financial. Political attacks aim to suppress information for political reasons, targeting sites covering human rights abuses, election fraud allegations, and other sensitive topics. Financial attacks are similar to online extortion, with ecommerce sites being threatened with an attack unless a ransom is paid. CloudFlare has been working to keep attacked websites online and support the internet's promise of enabling anyone with ideas to reach a global audience.

On November 2011, Apture announced its shutdown due to acquisition by Google, leaving thousands of Cloudflare customers without a contextual search service. In response, three members of the Cloudflare team held a one-day hackathon and developed Highlight, a similar service that provides web search, definitions, and "read aloud" functionality for users. The new app is available as a one-click install on Cloudflare-powered sites and can be used by Apture customers looking for a replacement.

The article discusses how automated bots significantly impact website performance. It highlights that on average, 20% of a website's requests come from some form of automated bot, including search engine crawlers and malicious ones. These bots often trigger pages not frequently accessed, leading to increased load on databases and servers. The author suggests implementing two different systems to handle these bots: restricting known malicious crawlers and modifying caching strategies for search engine crawlers. By doing so, the performance of a website can be significantly improved.

CloudFlare analyzed traffic data from hundreds of thousands of websites to determine whether hackers take holidays off. Approximately 15% of requests were threats, with the percentage varying depending on the day of the week and holiday season. Major U.S. holidays did not see a drop in threat traffic, while significant drops occurred around the start of summer and during Golden Week in China. The analysis suggests that attackers may be taking time off for traditional vacations or that resources used to launch attacks are less available during certain holidays.

On December 9, 2011, Matthew Prince announced that CloudFlare was about to cross the milestone of serving over 100 billion page views in a year. The company experienced rapid growth, with 25 billion of those page views occurring within just the last month. At the time, they were averaging more than 60,000 requests per second and had peak loads even higher. According to Google's traffic stats, only nine websites on the internet generated more page views than CloudFlare, and only seven saw more unique visitors. The company had a network capacity of over 150 gigabits per second and planned to open its 14th data center before year-end. They also increased server capacity in nine existing data centers by 40%.

On December 9, 2011, Kristin Tarr announced three winners for the WordCamp Las Vegas ticket giveaway: Chirag Patel, Michael Scott, and Ben Hebert. The winners were congratulated and encouraged to attend the conference where CloudFlare's Matthew Prince would be speaking. Additionally, all participants who entered the giveaway would receive a CloudFlare t-shirt via email in the near future.

On December 6th, 2011, Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, attended the Up 2011 Cloud Computing Conference in Mountain View, CA. He presented about CloudFlare and its growth as a nominee for the Fastest Growing Cloud Computing Company award. The competition had three finalists out of over 1,000 applicants, including Nulogy and Rightscale. Each company gave a 10-minute presentation to the audience and judges before the winners were announced. CloudFlare won the Audience Choice award, presented by Cloudcor and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The company expressed excitement over this new addition to their list of accolades.

CloudFlare, a platform for ecommerce sites, analyzed data from over 10,000 ecommerce websites to determine if Cyber Monday is real. They found that U.S.-based visits to these sites increased by 45% on average during Cyber Monday compared to the previous week. However, outside of the U.S., Canada saw a minor increase of 4%, while other countries experienced decreases in ecommerce traffic. Overall, CloudFlare's network witnessed a 12% increase in page views and a 15% rise in attacks directed at ecommerce sites on Cyber Monday.

On December 1st, 2011, Kristin Tarr announced a contest for two lucky winners to receive tickets to WordCamp Las Vegas, one of the top WordPress events of the year. The event will take place at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on Saturday, December 17th. Attendees will have access to all-day sessions and speaking engagements. To enter, individuals with a WordPress blog simply need to express their interest by stating "I Want to Go to WordCamp Las Vegas!" The deadline for entries is 5PM PST on Wednesday, December 7th, and winners will be announced the following day.