January 2012 Summaries

Khataland, an online store, experienced a significant surge in traffic after their product was featured on the TODAY Show's Steals & Deals segment. To handle this sudden influx of visitors, they turned to CloudFlare for assistance. CloudFlare is a platform that works with any webserver or platform to ensure websites are safe, fast, and available. Khataland signed up for CloudFlare Pro, which helped secure their transactions with Full SSL. Within an hour, everything was in place, allowing the company to focus on other preparations for their newfound customers. The website remained functional during this traffic spike, demonstrating the effectiveness of CloudFlare's services.

On January 16, 2012, Matthew Prince discussed how CloudFlare, a service that uses DNS to improve the internet, could be negatively impacted by proposed US legislation like SOPA and PIPA. These laws aim to address online copyright infringement by altering the internet's underlying infrastructure. Many websites planned to "blackout" their pages on January 18 to raise awareness about these dangers. However, complete site blackouts can have negative consequences such as reduced search rankings and crawl rates. To help users protest without hurting themselves, CloudFlare introduced an Anti-Censorship App that works without modifying website code. The app is available for users with their own domains on platforms like Tumblr, TypePad, WordPress, and Posterous.

On January 12, 2012, Matthew Prince reported that they monitor the Alexa top 1 million websites for trends, specifically tracking IPv6 connection support. About 1% of these large websites now accept and properly support IPv6 connections. Notably, around 10% of those supporting IPv6 do so through CloudFlare's free Automatic IPv6 Gateway. While progress is slow, Prince expressed pride in their contribution to expanding the modern Internet.

CloudFlare, a company that provides web performance and security services, is challenging traditional definitions of content delivery networks (CDNs). While CDN technology is part of what CloudFlare does, the company's broader capabilities extend beyond this. Unlike traditional CDNs, which only cache static content for some requests, CloudFlare handles all website requests, offering features such as attack mitigation, dynamic content modification, analytics, and more. Despite its growing popularity, with more websites using CloudFlare than all traditional CDNs combined, the company is still searching for a suitable category to accurately describe its services.

On January 5th, 2012, Kristin Tarr announces that CloudFlare is a Crunchie finalist in the Best Cloud Service category for 2011. The company seeks votes from its supporters to win the award. The Crunchies are an annual awards event supported by VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and GigaOm. Over 300,000 nominations were received from 20 countries. Voting is open until January 29th, 2012, with one vote per category allowed daily. The finalists will be announced on January 31st, 2012, in San Francisco.

ShareAndTell Pro is a social sweepstakes and rewards platform that can be integrated with CloudFlare, allowing users to set up giveaways on their websites and Facebook pages. The platform simplifies the process of running sweepstakes by handling compliance with state laws, tracking entrants, monitoring dates, and following through with winners. ShareAndTell Pro also provides analytics for real-time promotion tracking. Integration with CloudFlare allows users to add the platform to their website with a $20/month Basic plan, which includes an active promotion for one of the ShareAndTell Pro prizes. Users can customize the appearance and action of the widget and set up their own promotions with personalized giveaways.