April 2012 Summaries

CloudFlare introduces a new advanced server monitoring and outage management service from Panopta as a CloudFlare App, catering to both enterprises and small-medium businesses (SMBs). Panopta offers three unique features: deep and wide monitoring, no false alerts, and intelligent alerting. It provides in-depth checks every 60 seconds from its global network and tools to fix infrastructure issues promptly. Panopta has four different plans starting at $15/month for Solo and up to $250/month for Advanced. Users can sign up via CloudFlare Apps and customize their monitoring settings within the Panopta control panel.

CloudFlare experienced significant growth in traffic due to its ability to make websites faster. By improving routing efficiency to their Singapore data center, they saved an average of 25 milliseconds (0.025 seconds) for requests from countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This led to a 30% increase in bandwidth, hits, and page views in the region. The improvement in latency resulted in higher engagement and more internet use, aligning with the principle that faster means more. CloudFlare continues to add data centers and improve routing to make the web faster and safer for everyone.

CloudFlare has partnered with various CloudFlare Certified Partners to provide a faster and safer website experience for users. When signing up through a hosting partner, users do not need to change their name servers and can still manage DNS entries at their hosting provider or registrar. However, enabling CloudFlare on the root domain requires setting a 301 redirect from the root domain to www. Users may encounter error messages after enabling CloudFlare, which can be resolved by contacting the hosting provider or CloudFlare support teams. Key features of CloudFlare include SSL, Development Mode, PageRules, and optional features like Rocket Loader, Auto Minify, and IPv6 Gateway. For more information, users can visit the CloudFlare Support Center or follow them on social media platforms.

SiteLock is a website security monitoring service that protects your online reputation and provides additional security to your website. It alerts you if your site is vulnerable to threats such as malware, SQL Injection, Cross-site scripting, and more. The service combines proactive scanning and blocklist monitoring to ensure your investment is protected and your reputation is safe. SiteLock offers features like daily 360-degree scanning for various vulnerabilities, on-demand expert services, alerts & email notifications, dashboard reports, and a Trust Seal for secure sites. It is now available via the Cloudflare Apps.

CloudFlare, an internet security company, has introduced "I'm Under Attack Mode" as part of its DDoS protection service. This new feature adds additional protections against HTTP-based attacks that target the application layer of a network stack. When enabled, visitors to a site will see an interstitial page for about 5 seconds while checks are completed to verify their legitimacy. Once verified, they can browse the site without further hindrance. The new mode does not block search engine crawlers or known legitimate traffic and helps improve CloudFlare's traditional protections against DDoS attacks.

CloudFlare, a company providing web protection services, launched ScrapeShield, an anti-content scraping app built on its existing services to offer comprehensive anti-scraping and tracking tools. The inspiration for CloudFlare originated from Project Honeypot, an anti-spamming project launched in 2004 by some of the company's founders. ScrapeShield leverages this eight-year foundation of deep web intelligence to provide a robust solution against content scraping and theft. The service also provides insights into how site content is being used, such as through RSS feeds or translations. CloudFlare's enormous scale and continuous growth contribute to the ongoing improvement of its bot and scraper intelligence, making ScrapeShield a powerful and reliable anti-scraping solution.

In this blog post, Damon Billian from Cloudflare discusses changes made to the DNS editor in their site's new UI. The changes aim to make it easier for users to locate and understand various features of the DNS editor. These include clarifying the meanings of orange and gray clouds in a Cloudflare zone file, explaining how to edit existing DNS records or add new ones, troubleshooting subdomain issues, and configuring mail and MX records properly. The author encourages users to provide suggestions for improving the DNS editor and offers various channels such as Twitter and Facebook for feedback.

Matthew Prince discusses CloudFlare's expansion beyond Silicon Valley, with significant user bases in countries like China, Brazil, Turkey, and Great Britain. The company has 14 data centers across eight countries on three continents, with plans for further international growth. He also addresses the historical limitations of the web supporting non-Latin alphabets and how CloudFlare now supports International Domain Names (IDNs) directly in their interface, allowing users to enter domains using native characters.

On April 5th, 2012, web hosting company DreamHost announced a partnership with CloudFlare, an Internet web performance and security company. This partnership made CloudFlare's services available to all DreamHost customers at little or no cost as part of their hosting plans. The integration was designed to be simple and user-friendly, requiring only one click for setup. Additionally, DreamHost created a special plan called "CloudFlare Plus" in collaboration with CloudFlare, offering some popular paid features at a lower price point than the standard Pro product. This partnership aimed to provide enhanced website performance and security to DreamHost customers while also expanding CloudFlare's reach within the web hosting industry.