14 DAY TRIAL // CloudFlare, a two-year-old company, is taking the web by storm and it's doing without anyone actually noticing. Sure, insiders know all about CloudFlare or if they don't they sure will, but the public has no clue what it is and what it does, even though they may be using it without even knowing.
And that's actually a good thing, CloudFlare is an infrastructure company, it's designed to keep websites running in an attack or when problems occur and it's supposed to do it without anyone noticing it.
Add to that the fact that the company doesn't have or need a sales team or any sort of marketing and it's easy to understand how it's staying under the radar.
Meanwhile, it now handles more traffic than some of the biggest websites on the planet and serves enough people to be in the top 10, if it were a stand-alone site.
At this point, again, two years since it got going, it serves 70 billion, with a 'b', pageviews every month. And it does it for 600 million people, each and every month. By now it has served half a trillion pageviews.
Granted, with 500,000 websites now using the service, these kinds of numbers aren't that impressive. But they're still big, any way you look at it.
CloudFlare is a content delivery network at heart, but a key function is also improving security by distributing the resources used by a site in the cloud.
It's technology is constantly used by sites to avert DDoS attacks since its infrastructure is more than able to absorb huge amounts of traffic and also by using too many IPs to be targeted by a DDoS attack. At the same time, distributing resources across many machines across the world has the benefit of speeding up access to a site, as with any CDN.