September 2012 Summaries

On September 27, 2010, CloudFlare was launched by its founders Matthew Prince, Michelle, and Lee after a year and a half of development. Since then, the company has experienced rapid growth, with over half a million websites using their services and billions of page views handled per month. The key to this scaling success is attributed to the talented team at CloudFlare. As they celebrate their second anniversary, the company aims to continue growing and improving the internet experience for users worldwide.

On September 25, 2012, Kristin Tarr announced that CloudFlare is now protecting an interactive iPad app from the National Museum of Health + Medicine Chicago (NMHMC) which allows users to examine Albert Einstein's brain through high-resolution microscopic images. The NMHMC Harvey App provides access to the Harvey Collection, prepared by Dr. Thomas Harvey, who performed Einstein's autopsy. Users can explore these ultra-high-resolution microscopic slide images at various magnification levels using their iPads. The app has received significant media coverage and its launch was successful with CloudFlare's assistance in ensuring fast, secure, and available access for users.

CloudFlare has introduced Prosperent's ProsperLinks, an automated system that analyzes page content and delivers highly targeted product references directly in your content. This affiliate tool helps publishers earn extra revenue without negatively impacting the reader experience. ProsperLinks automatically converts existing links into affiliated ones and users can choose from different styles of link presentation to control user experience. The system is free to install, with 70% of revenue going to website owners, paid on a net-60 day basis.

The text discusses a 65Gbps DDoS attack experienced by CloudFlare on September 17, 2012. It explains that such an attack is considered large and requires significant resources to execute. The attacker likely used a botnet of compromised computers to generate the traffic. Additionally, the attack utilized a technique called DNS reflection, which amplifies the size of the attack by exploiting misconfigured DNS resolvers. CloudFlare mitigates such attacks through its network architecture and filtering mechanisms.

On September 16, 2012, CloudFlare experienced an interruption in its network services due to a combination of factors including issues with an upstream bandwidth provider and misapplication of a network rate limit during a DDoS attack. The incident affected many customers' websites, particularly those hosted in Europe. The company has since worked on improving its smoke tests and automating more attack mitigation processes to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

In September 2012, Matthew Prince of Cloudflare shared his experiences and insights about launching at TechCrunch Disrupt events. He discussed how the platform helped companies like Bitcasa, CakeHealth, and GoInstant to manage high traffic volumes during their launches. According to data from 20 Battlefield companies that used CloudFlare's network, a typical site can expect a surge of 3x-10x in traffic over three days at TC Disrupt. Companies with consumer appeal tend to receive more traffic than those focused on business or enterprise. Effective use of social media can further amplify the traffic. Traffic builds throughout the competition and peaks when TechCrunch publishes an article about a company. For finalists, traffic can reach hundreds of requests per second during their presentation. Despite the high pressure, launching at Disrupt is considered a rewarding experience by many participants.

The text discusses the problem of 404 errors on websites, which are common occurrences due to constantly changing content. These errors can lead to increased bounce rates and negatively impact SEO. To address this issue, CloudFlare introduced a beta feature called SmartErrors that dynamically transforms dead-end error pages into an intelligent site search. In their testing across hundreds of CloudFlare sites, they measured average visitor engagement rates of over 12%, with some sites as high as 75-80%. Smarterrors can also help improve SEO by keeping visitors and search crawlers on the site.