January 2013 Summaries

On January 18, 2013, John Graham-Cumming gave a presentation about using CloudFlare with WordPress sites at the WordPress London Meetup held at Google Campus. The event was sponsored by CloudFlare, which provided refreshments and pizza. Two talks were given: Laura Kalbag discussed designing icons for WordPress sites using Sketch, while John Graham-Cumming covered using WordPress and CloudFlare together. Key features highlighted included the CloudFlare WordPress Plugin, W3TC integration, Always Online, Auto-minify, Rocket Loader, Easy SSL, SPDY, and IPv6 support. Additionally, an unannounced feature called "Help, I've gone viral!" was briefly mentioned, allowing site owners to request complete caching of a URL during high traffic periods.

CloudFlare is participating in Parallels Summit, taking place from February 4th to 6th in Las Vegas. The company will be offering complimentary limo rides between McCarran International Airport and Caesars Palace Hotel for attendees. They have recently partnered with Parallels, allowing service providers to increase revenue while enhancing security and performance of customers' web properties and applications. CloudFlare representatives will be available at Booth #113 during the event, where they will also conduct live video interviews with industry leaders. CEO Matthew Prince will speak on a cloud portfolio panel and present in the Partners Theater Presentation. Attendees can follow updates on Twitter using the hashtag #parallelssummit.

On January 11, 2013, Cloudflare scheduled maintenance from 21:00 - 23:00 UTC during which its interface was offline. The maintenance involved moving half a million websites to new IP addresses and rebalancing them into new pools of resources for better load distribution and protection against attacks. Despite some minor issues affecting a small number of customers, the migration was successful, making Cloudflare's network more flexible and robust.

The text discusses how search engine optimization (SEO) can help a website attract more organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, and Baidu. It introduces CloudFlare's new app, Clearspike, which automates the SEO process to improve site ranking. Clearspike offers three service plans: Self-Service ($24/month), Automated ($49/month), and Do-It-For-Me ($199/month). The app actively reviews websites for possible improvements, provides recommendations, and measures progress. It is available exclusively to CloudFlare customers through the app development platform.

CloudFlare, a company with one of the largest networks of DNS servers globally, has been consistently ranked among the top-5 fastest DNS providers by SolveDNS. In recent tests, they achieved second place with an average response time of 4.51ms, just behind the leader at 4.38ms and significantly faster than third place at 8.85ms. Notably, CloudFlare's fast Anycast DNS service is available for free plans as well. The company plans to release a major update (RRDNS) in the coming months aimed at further improving their DNS speeds.

In 2012, Cloudflare served over 679 billion page views and saved its customers 436 petabytes of bandwidth. The company added 10 new data centers and saw more than 720 million unique IPs connect to their network, representing approximately 1.3 billion internet users. This translates to saving over 891 lifetimes worth of time that would have been spent waiting for websites to load. Looking forward to 2013, Cloudflare plans on introducing new features and improvements for a faster and safer internet experience.