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Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

forbes.com

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Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#31

Post by philip1209 »

Karunamon wrote: post #19

Silly question: How does CloudFlare make any money? Any random can put any site behind their (very fully featured) free services and get free CDN, free antimalware, and free $other_services, with no seeming limits as to the amount of traffic you get. This has no impact on the target site. There are no ads or any other such. Their enterprise products only offer a few more features at a massive cost hike. How are the b…

The consumer freemium model is probably negligible money in the grand scheme of things. Here is an article about how Cloudflare developed a keyless SSL tool to bring Goldman Sachs on as a client:

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/new-internet-security-tool-guar...

Downtime is expensive for large companies, including financial institutions. A DDOS that takes down the site could cause a dip in the stock price. CloudFlare technology (should) prevent DDOS and other basic security issues. It does this without appliances and without having access to private SSL keys.

Imagine the opportunity cost of a bank going offline, and you can start to understand just how much money CloudFlare stands to make from large corporations.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#32

Post by nly »

JorgeGT wrote: post #12
Nux wrote: post #4

Welcome to the Cloudflare-net. Half the internet is behind CloudFlare now. Since they can't easily "own" the Internet, they could as well own CloudFlare. Not impressed and I hate all this hiding behind Cloudflare and other proxy services; most of the cases are just hipster/hype powered, rather than in actual need.

I use CloudFlare because I like their DNS service; I've switched off proxy/caching entirely :|

It's pretty amusing that the DNS has such a distributed design yet everyone wants to centralise their authoritative nameservers on services like Route 53 and Cloudflare. Latency shouldn't really be an argument in the case of DNS because it was designed such that folks would be using their ISPs low-latency caches/recursors

In theory, HTTP could have been the same way, if it wasn't for for complete lack of respect caching got once the web moved to dynamic database-driven designs and the temptation for middleboxes to overstep their remit.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#33

Post by chubot »

If your website is well-coded and administered, does CloudFlare offer any performance benefit? (leaving aside security for now)

If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap.

If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up? You don't want them serving stale pages to users. So it has to hit your server every time, in which case the user might as well hit your server. In that case, I don't really see how CloudFlare improves things.

Am I misunderstanding how CloudFlare works? It seems like if you follow typical performance tips like [1] then most of CloudFlare's benefit is eliminated.

I guess [1] does tell you to use a CDN. You can save end user network latency for cached static pages, since they cache them in multiple geographic locations. But if you have a simple site with 1 .js and 1 .css file per page, and compress and minify everything, I wonder if it's worth it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529309

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#34

Post by scurvy »

duncans wrote: post #8

Following this iOS Content Blocker furore, a CloudFlare-type service could be an ideal place from which to inject and serve ads; as opposed to the client-perf-sapping script tags the industry has been using so far.

One of their future business plans is/could be to replace your low performing ads with their higher performing ads in far-flung locations you're not optimizing for.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#35

Post by psior »

polskibus wrote: post #7

How does CloudFlare compare to Akamai? Are they direct competitors?

Mostly. Regardless Alexa's ranking flaws, these two graphs seem to infer that Akamai's (https://hostingdetector.com/webhost/akamai.com#stat) main cut comes from the highest traffic sites while CloudFlare (https://hostingdetector.com/webhost/cloudflare.com#stat) seems to be more uniformly distributed (especially after 300K)

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#37

Post by snug »

dazc wrote: post #28
chromaton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay them $20 a month. I needed HTTPS back in the days before that was part of their free plan and kept on with the paid plan. I'm not sure what features the free plan lacks, but $20 a month isn't going to break the bank. I found their application firewall very useful for stopping spam registrations.

I'm using the free option on a bunch of sites. I would pay $20 but, with their current pricing structure, I can't foresee a reason for me to do so?

It's not so well known, but the first pro plan is $20, any pro plan after that is only $5/month. So if you need the WAF, it's a really great price.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#38

Post by LoSboccacc »

chubot wrote: post #33

If your website is well-coded and administered, does CloudFlare offer any performance benefit? (leaving aside security for now) If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap. If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up? You don't want them serving…

we use it on our image heavy startup. reduces the load on the server by a fair margin, and since images are loaded on S3 it also reduces the operating cost quite a bit

additionally it's geolocated, so we get that for free, which is nice.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#39

Post by NDizzle »

nly wrote: post #32
JorgeGT wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use CloudFlare because I like their DNS service; I've switched off proxy/caching entirely :|

It's pretty amusing that the DNS has such a distributed design yet everyone wants to centralise their authoritative nameservers on services like Route 53 and Cloudflare. Latency shouldn't really be an argument in the case of DNS because it was designed such that folks would be using their ISPs low-latency caches/recursors In theory, HTTP could have been the same way, if it wasn't for for complete lack of respect cach…

Are you saying that Route 53 and Cloudflare don't have distributed DNS? How could they not be, when my OLD PAL 4.2.2.2 has been distributed since the 90s?

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#40

Post by adamt »

chubot wrote: post #33

If your website is well-coded and administered, does CloudFlare offer any performance benefit? (leaving aside security for now) If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap. If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up? You don't want them serving…

> If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap.

With the static content it's not the cost of serving it, it's the fact that Cloudflare is serving it from a large bunch of distributed servers that are likely to offer far lower latency to the end-user than your servers. With modern web pages often containing hundreds of objects, this can make a big difference to page load times.

If all your customers are in one geography this is less of an issue, but if you have a global audience this can make a huge difference.

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