For better or worse, most of you have probably heard of Justin Bieber by now.

Besides being a teenage pop music phenomenon, he is also one of the most influential celebrities when it comes to social media. He has 11.2 million followers on his Twitter acount, and his Facebook fan page is currently at 33.3 million 'likes'.

So what happens to your website when someone like Bieber decides to tweet about LA traffic and include a picture on the photo sharing service Instagram?

Well, two things:

1. You gain tons of free press, users, and app downloads - which is awesome.

2. Your servers nearly melt from the massive spike in volume - which is not so awesome.

This is the IDEAL scenario for where CloudFlare can help sites like Instagram avoid a complete meltdown when their 'Bieber Effect' moment happens.

You see, CloudFlare has 2 key competencies - our cloud-based service make websites faster and more secure. On average, websites using our service load twice as fast, use 60% less bandwidth, and serve 65% fewer requests.

One of the many ways that we do this is via our globally distributed CDN,which caches static content (including photos), and manages the serving of this content for you. This means that for the majority of the requests for Beiber's LA traffic photo would have been handled by CloudFlare's servers and not Instagram's, saving Instagram for the headache and costs of dealing with such a massive spike.

Not bad, considering that it's all for free.

The best part is that all of this can be accomplished through a signup and setup process which lasts 5 minutes or less.

So take a moment and sign up for CloudFlare today, before your website has its own 'Bieber Effect' moment and it's too late!

I used to know a lot about my audience, because I had a custom WordPress installation running and was able to install Google Analytics. Eventually this became too much of a headache for just a hobby, so I migrated over to WordPress.com to host my domain and blog.

I'm guessing that the majority of people who use WordPress.com for their blogs fall into these same categories:

• People who are NOT technically savvy enough to handle hosting and managing their own WordPress installation (and/or)

• People who simply don't want to deal with it. This is after all, why WordPress exists, no?

I didn't realize it at first, but in doing so I no longer had the luxury of Google Analytics on the WordPress.com implementation, as WordPress doesn't support this feature. Instead, WordPress offers their own proprietary analytics offering, which seems perfectly fine. However I have multiple sites, including non-WordPress sites, and I would like to have continuity in the analytics and tracking systems I use.

Equally troubling was the fact that I couldn't migrate over the reporting history from Google Analytics into WordPress. There may be a feature that supports this, but again, it's not something the average user is going to do. The chart below will illustrate this issue I'm experiencing, as I moved off of WordPress.com in December 2009 and back on again this month.

Thisis where the CloudFlare Apps feature of our service came in extremely handy. One of the ways that CloudFlare makes sites easier to manage is by enabling popular apps for the domain owner - in this case, it was Google Analytics. Since CloudFlare is optimizing and delivering your site's content to your visitors, it inserts the Google Analytics JavaScript tracking code in the proper place as your site's visitors pass through our network. Your site now benefits from both WordPress.com site analytics and Google Analytics.

Enabling Google Analytics via CloudFlare Apps is a really cool feature that took a total of about 2 minutes for me to setup. There are plenty of other cool apps that are available as well - and the best part is that the CloudFlare service and many of the CloudFlare Apps are completely free!