July 2012 Summaries

Verelo, a website monitoring service that provides sub-minute checks, downtime alerts by SMS, phone or email, and malware detection, has been publicly announced as Cloudflare's newest app partner. The company was founded by two former hosting professionals who identified the need for constant site and server monitoring. Verelo offers features such as prevention, detection, responses, and reporting for malicious activity on websites. It also provides response time and uptime graphs, sub-minute monitoring, and a 911 conference call system. Velero has various plans starting at free to cater to different customer needs.

CloudFlare introduces Infolinks, an application that automatically adds in-text ads to websites. The service works by turning keywords into relevant ads when a visitor hovers over them. It operates in real time and is designed to overcome "banner blindness." Users earn revenue from clicks on the ads, with payments sent directly to their bank or PayPal account. To enable Infolinks, users need only turn on the app in their CloudFlare dashboard. The service is suitable for publishers with rich content but may not be compatible with every website, particularly those containing adult or offensive material.

On July 27, 2012, Matthew Prince announced that CloudFlare has opened its 17th data center in Seattle, Washington. This expansion will help serve traffic from the Pacific Northwest and reduce load on San Jose, one of their busiest data centers. Additionally, they have updated their network map to represent land as shades of gray instead of blue, addressing confusion among customers who believed water should be blue, not land. As a side note, Prince mentioned that CloudFlare has processed over 400 billion page views and saved 40 petabytes of bandwidth for its users.

Team CloudFlare attended HostingCon 2012, where they provided limo rides for nearly 200 attendees and hosted three days of breakfast. They launched their Optimized Hosting Partners Program, offering free access to Railgun, a revolutionary optimization product. Seven partners joined the program's launch, including VEXXHOST, A2 Hosting, Media Temple, Blue Host, DreamHost, HostPapa, and Site5. The team also brought 500 Railgun Nerf guns as giveaways. Co-founder Michelle conducted interviews with industry leaders, while co-founder Matthew participated in panels discussing Railgun integration and DDoS attack defense strategies. CloudFlare gave out hundreds of t-shirts and shared photos from the event.

On July 26, 2012, Matthew Prince announced the launch of two new CloudFlare data centers in Sydney, Australia (their 15th) and Atlanta, Georgia (their 16th). These are the first two of nine additional facilities planned to be opened over the next few weeks. The choice of Atlanta as a location is connected to its famous Coca Cola brand, which many CloudFlare employees enjoy, and also to former business school classmate Fred Smith who now lives in Atlanta. Additionally, Atlanta is home to Codeguard, one of CloudFlare's App partners.

CloudFlare is significantly expanding its global network by adding nine new data centers and doubling the size of its existing London facility, resulting in a total of 23 data centers and nearly 70% more network capacity. The first of these facilities has been established in Sydney, Australia, which previously experienced ping times over 160 milliseconds when served from Singapore or Los Angeles. With the new Sydney facility, ping times for Australian and New Zealand users are now averaging under 40 milliseconds.

On July 14, 2012, Matthew Prince announced that Cloudflare now supports single file purge, allowing users to clear the cache of a specific URL without affecting other cached files. Previously, users could only purge their entire cache or wait for it to expire. The new feature is available to all Cloudflare users and can be accessed via the API. Developers are encouraged to create systems that automatically update Cloudflare's network when files on a server have been updated, ensuring the latest copies are fetched.

CloudFlare is a company that provides security services to nearly half a million websites worldwide. The author discusses their approach to handling abuse complaints and maintaining a free and open internet. They emphasize that they do not believe in censoring content, but will take action against sites spreading malware or powering phishing sites. CloudFlare has developed a solution for blocking such sites while educating visitors about the risks. The author also addresses issues with handling DMCA complaints and explains their process to protect customers from attacks while allowing legitimate complaintants to serve notice. They welcome suggestions on how to improve this process.

Cloudflare is participating at HostingCon 2012 in Boston from July 15th to 18th. They are looking forward to meeting current and potential new partners, hosting several events including complimentary limousine service, daily breakfasts, an exhibit booth, and parties. For their partners, they have special gifts like Cloudflare t-shirts and mystery goodies for the launch of Railgun. For non-partners, they will be explaining how Cloudflare can save server and bandwidth resources, provide DDOS protection, IPv6 compatibility, and more. They have a packed schedule with events such as sponsored breakfasts, speeches by their co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince, live video interviews with industry leaders, and an exhibit booth at the event.

Time To First Byte (TTFB) is a common metric used to evaluate web server response times, but it may not be the most accurate or helpful measure. TTFB measures the duration from when an HTTP request is made to when the first byte of the page is received by the browser. However, popular web testing sites often report TTFB as the time the first byte of the HTTP response is received, which can be misleading because response headers are generated quickly and do not necessarily reflect the actual content download time. Furthermore, TTFB can be affected by factors such as compression, where enabling gzip compression may increase TTFB but decrease overall page load time. Instead of relying solely on TTFB, it is more important to focus on optimizing end-user experience and measuring metrics like real end-user page visible time.

On July 3, 2012, Matthew Prince discussed HTTP caching and its limitations in delivering performance benefits for web pages with dynamic content. Traditional Content Delivery Network (CDN) vendors introduced Edge Side Include (ESI) protocol to address this issue but it was not widely adopted due to the complexity of implementation. Cloudflare's Railgun technology automates ESI support without requiring changes in code, offering significant performance benefits and ease of use for web publishers. The company aims to make such advanced technologies accessible and affordable for all its customers.

In this blog post, John Graham-Cumming discusses the use of Go programming language for developing Railgun software at CloudFlare. The choice of Go was due to its inherent concurrency feature which is essential for handling large numbers of requests from data centers and clients' servers. Railgun extensively uses goroutines and channels, making it easy to create 'fire and forget until needed' systems. Additionally, Go's object-oriented approach with interfaces allows for flexibility in usage. The simplicity of the language's library and its ability to generate a single executable also contributed to its choice for this project.

Cloudflare, a popular content delivery network, has introduced a premium service called Railgun that aims to speed up the delivery of web content that cannot be cached. The primary advantage of using Cloudflare is its ability to cache and deliver static content from data centers around the world, improving latency issues for users globally. However, only about 66% of website content can be cached, with the remaining 34% requiring retrieval from the origin web server. Railgun addresses this issue by using a scheme that dramatically reduces bandwidth usage and improves download times for dynamic or personalized web pages. It achieves this by recognizing that uncacheable web pages do not change rapidly and uses this fact to achieve high compression rates, similar to video compression techniques. The technical details of Railgun involve two components: the sender and the listener, which establish a permanent TCP connection secured by TLS for the Railgun protocol. This system allows multiple HTTP requests to be run simultaneously and asynchronously across the link, resulting in significant performance improvements compared to standard gzip compression methods.

The article discusses the problem of phishing attacks on the internet, which have become more sophisticated as criminals now hack sites instead of using email to hide their tracks and deceive users into revealing personal information. CloudFlare, a company that helps make the web faster and safer, has developed an anti-phishing process to notify site owners about phishing content on their sites and block such pages. The article also provides tips for protecting websites from future hacks and phishing attempts, including using SSL encryption, regularly updating CMS platforms, plugins, and server software, and seeking assistance from hosting providers if necessary.