Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

thenextweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#21

Post by davepeck »

damoncloudflare wrote: post #19
moe wrote: post #3

Perhaps someone can demystify CloudFlare for me? Their value proposition is completely absurd ("protect websites from hacking"), yet they're still around and get quite a bit of seemingly expensive PR-spin like this article. Who pays for the "accidental CDN" that, according to the article, pushes as much traffic as the 10th largest website on the internet? Their optional $20/mo subscription plan can't possibly cover t…

Similar to many other companies operating on the internet these days, CloudFlare operates on a freemium model (free vs paid products). We also have some other opportunities to make money with other product integrations & will be launching enterprise products in the future. We're not going anywhere:)

Can you explain your technology more directly? Your web site doesn't have a lot of technical detail, perhaps because people who would understand the technical details aren't your target audience.

For the HN crowd, understanding what pieces are in play would help a great deal. I figure it's probably a nice cache + CDN service?

I'll admit that I don't get your security claims -- it seems like entirely the wrong layer to deal with security issues.

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#24

Post by david_shaw »

eastdakota wrote: post #6
bradmccarty wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you have to look at how CloudFlare is billing itself. It's a simple solution for people who want to have a faster website. It's easier to implement than most other caching or CDN and that $20 plan is likely limited to sites under X amount of traffic. The company is only sitting on around $2 mm in funding (if memory serves me) so it's either making a decent sum of money from people who find value in that…

We're not going to fizzle out any time soon. :-)

Nice to see you on HN; I was wondering if you had any comment in regard to the huge surge in attention (mostly great reviews, from what I've seen) thanks to LulzSec using your service?

Like many others, I hadn't heard of CloudFlare until it started showing up all over Twitter (and the Internet in general) in relation to LulzSec.

I'm glad you guys got some nice exposure, and I might start using your service myself soon!

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#25

Post by ceejayoz »

BoppreH wrote: post #20
shii wrote: post #2

Has been used by Lulzsec effectively to hold up against DDoS attacks and popularized by them on Twitter as well. It works.

In CloudFlare's Features page ( https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-services.html ), "Denial of service attack protection" is marked as not available now or even soon. Not sure how this stands against a DDoS.

A CDN is always going to have DDoS mitigation as a side-effect.

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#26

Post by norova »

damoncloudflare wrote: post #13
bbatsell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who pays for the "accidental CDN" that, according to the article, pushes as much traffic as the 10th largest website on the internet? Their optional $20/mo subscription plan can't possibly cover that. They use VigLink to add affiliate tags to the external links of the sites that use them.

"They use VigLink to add affiliate tags to the external links of the sites that use them." This is actually an optional service (Outbound Links) that can be turned on or off (opt-in by default). No affiliate links are added without turning the feature on.

And by enabling this feature it generates affiliate revenue for the user, not for CloudFlare. (Correct me if I'm wrong, Damon.)

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#27

Post by aonic »

eastdakota wrote: post #10
eli wrote: post #7

I remember signing up for the beta of this service not really understanding how it worked and was pretty weirded out when it asked me to point my DNS to their server. That's not an anti-spam product, that's hosting.

CloudFlare is reverse proxy. You keep your existing hosting provider. It's just like how Postini, MX Logic, or MessageLabs stopped email spam via a change to DNS.

What do you guys use for your reverse proxying? Custom software with very good on-the-fly HTML processing?

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#28

Post by Hisoka »

eastdakota wrote: post #18
trotsky wrote: post #17

I doubt I'm your target market, so feel free to ignore me, but do you have a page that explains what you're really offering minus all the marketing hand waving? It sounds like it might be interesting but it's difficult to wade through the 10,000 ft view stuff. For example, I just picked this mouseover that interested me: The threat challenge page stops known threats and alerts infected humans that they need to take a…

If a threat is detected (either because the IP has a bad reputation, or a request contains a malicious payload) then, depending on your security settings, instead of the request being passed to your web server it is answered by the proxy. The answer is a web page that, again depending on your security settings and the type of threat, includes a CAPTCHA. If the visitor passes the CAPTCHA then their session is marked a…

Do you stop scrapers that use browsers, and rotates 100 different proxies with different C classes, and uses fake headers?

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#29

Post by eastdakota »

davepeck wrote: post #21
damoncloudflare wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to many other companies operating on the internet these days, CloudFlare operates on a freemium model (free vs paid products). We also have some other opportunities to make money with other product integrations & will be launching enterprise products in the future. We're not going anywhere:)

Can you explain your technology more directly? Your web site doesn't have a lot of technical detail, perhaps because people who would understand the technical details aren't your target audience. For the HN crowd, understanding what pieces are in play would help a great deal. I figure it's probably a nice cache + CDN service? I'll admit that I don't get your security claims -- it seems like entirely the wrong layer t…

Sure. At a high level: We run out of 12 data centers scattered around the world (Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Jose, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Ashburn, Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt). We use Anycast (listen to the same IP out of multiple locations) as well as GeoIP DNS in order to route a request from a visitor to the website to the nearest data center. In each data center we run a reverse proxy that does full inspection (down to Layer 7) of each request looking for threat signatures. The data centers also run caching where we automatically detect static objects that make up a website and store them to be closer to the visitor. Requests for objects that are not cached are passed back to the origin server. The origin server's response passes back through CloudFlare's proxy, which can scan, analyze, and rewrite the content without blocking delivery.

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#30

Post by eastdakota »

norova wrote: post #26
damoncloudflare wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They use VigLink to add affiliate tags to the external links of the sites that use them." This is actually an optional service (Outbound Links) that can be turned on or off (opt-in by default). No affiliate links are added without turning the feature on.

And by enabling this feature it generates affiliate revenue for the user, not for CloudFlare. (Correct me if I'm wrong, Damon.)

Yes. If you enable Viglink through CloudFlare Apps then the webmaster is paid Viglink's standard a commission for any affiliated links.
Post reply on HN