More than 10 trillion requests flow through Cloudflare every month. More than 4 million customers and 10% of internet requests benefit from our global network. Cloudflare's virtual backbone gives every packet improved performance, security, and reliability.

That's the macro picture.

What's more interesting is keeping each individual customer globally available. While every customer benefits from the network effect of Cloudflare, each customer is (appropriately) focused on their application uptime, security and performance.

Cloudflare’s new Rate Limiting allows a customer to rate limit, shape or block traffic based on the number of requests per second per IP, cookie, or authentication token. Traffic can be controlled on a per-URI (with wildcards for greater flexibility) basis giving pinpoint control over a website, application, or API.

Customers seek reliability and availability in the face of popularity or unexpected traffic such as slow brute force attacks on a WordPress site, Denial of Service against dynamic pages, or the stampede of requests that comes with success. We are the leader at stopping significant DDoS attacks and offer a comprehensive WAF to target specific application-level attacks.

Now we are adding the capability to give each customer fine-grained control over the traffic that reaches their origin servers.

Even well-engineered applications have a resource limit. Any dynamic endpoint either has a hard system limit or an economic limit on the number of servers you can afford. Those expensive endpoints need additional protection against floods of traffic, including legitimate visitors. You can provision for the worst case...but when you find a new Pokémon Go on your hands, the best case hurts, too.

To shield origins from attack and preserve uptime, Cloudflare Rate Limiting lets you throttle, block, and otherwise control the flow of traffic to maintain availability, limit economic impact and preserve performance. All of which can be done with thoughtful configuration, testing rules to measure their impact, and applying changes globally within seconds.

That solves several problems. Rate Limiting protects APIs as well as web pages. Different version of your APIs can not only have different rate limit triggers, but they can return custom JSON responses or response codes if, for instance, you want to obfuscate the standard 429 HTTP error code.

Static pages are easy to cache at Cloudflare's edge, so high traffic on a home page is welcome. But a competitor scraping your search results is different, and may cause economic pain in server resources in addition to disrupting business as usual. So Rate Limiting lets you define specific URLs with lower limits and different policies.

Similarly, rules designed to protect a login endpoint enables real users to still access your application while defending yourself from brute-force attacks designed to break into your system or simply exhaust your resources. Rate Limiting gives customers this power, in part, by distinguishing between POSTs versus GETs and identifying authentication failures through the server response code.

From rate limiting within your applications to replacing hardware capabilities at the top of your rack, Rate Limiting solves a problem that otherwise requires several tools and custom development to solve. In the future, Rate Limiting will become even more intelligent, automatically enabling caching on your marketing site on a product launch, queueing customers on Black Friday to ensure your e-commerce system handles the demand, and helping to maximize the return on your IT investments by protecting them from damaging spikes and traffic patterns.

For many customers, gone are the days of running a single server for their web application. Two scenarios are common: a single datacenter or cloud provider running multiple load-balanced servers, and replication of that infrastructure across multiple geographies.

Customers have moved to load balanced infrastructure to provide reliability, handle traffic spikes, and handle traffic locally in different regions of the world.

The beauty of the single server approach was that it was simple to manage: all traffic from everywhere on the Internet hit the same server. Unfortunately, that doesn’t scale to today’s Internet and so controls are needed to handle load balancing across servers and locations.

Cloudflare’s new Traffic Manager enables a customer to keep their application running during a failure or better handle unexpected spikes in traffic by load balancing across multiple servers, datacenters, and geographies.

Traffic Manager has four major features: health checks, load balancing, failover and geo-steering.

Health checks automatically test the availability of individual origin servers so that Traffic Manager has a real-time view of the health of your origin servers. This information is used for failover and load balancing.

Load balancing automatically shares traffic across a collection of origin servers; if an origin server fails a health check it is automatically removed and load is shared across the remaining servers. For more complex environments an entire collection of origin servers can be removed from receiving traffic if the number of failed servers in the collection falls below some safe threshold.

Geo-steering allows a customer to configure traffic delivery to specific origin server groups based on the physical location of the visitor.

Health checks, load balancing, failover, and geo-steering work together to give customers fine grained control over their traffic.

Cloudflare Traffic Manager checks the health of applications from 100+ locations around the world, taking automatic action to route around failure, based on policies crafted by each customer.

Fiber cut in Malaysia? Host not responding for customers in Minneapolis? Checking from every location on a network with more public internet exchanges than any other company means you get localized, specific decision making. When a problem crops up on the network path to one of our customers' servers, we'll route that traffic instantly to another healthy, available server -- without changing the policy for other, healthy routes.

Sometimes, it's not the network. With Traffic Manager, you may load balance across individual hosts and across multiple hosts. Application down on AWS? Send those visitors to your Rackspace-hosted application in seconds. Failover from a cloud provider to your own datacenter, and back again as soon as your primary location is healthy again.

Other times, customers run different instances to account for the speed of light, and be as close as possible to their customers -- much as Cloudflare does. With Traffic Manager, you can route visitors to your site to the nearest host, based on their region. Choose to send visitors in Munich to your datacenter in Amsterdam, and visitors from Kansas City to your St. Louis datacenter. These policies can be combined, so if your European datacenter is down, then and only then send that traffic to your United States datacenter.

Many of our customers put significant investment into the availability of their infrastructure. Traffic Manager extends that investment across Cloudflare's ever-growing global network.

CloudFlare Traffic is now available in Early Access for all customers, and will be available publicly before the end of the year. Read more about Traffic Manager and Rate Limiting and request access in your Cloudflare dashboard, in the Traffic app.

**Note: This post was updated 4/13/17 to reflect the current product name. All references to Traffic Control have been changed to Rate Limiting.*

CC BY 2.0 image by Marcin Wichary

Today, with our network nearing 80 global locations, we're pleased to announce support for WebSockets for all our customers, including Enterprise, Business, Pro, and Free, with resources allocated by plan level.

If you don't want to read RFC 6455, then this short paragraph from our previous blog post explains:

The WebSocket protocol is a distinct TCP-based protocol, however, it’s initiated by an HTTP request which is then "upgraded" to create a persistent connection between the browser and the server. A WebSocket connection is bidirectional: the server can send data to the browser without the browser having to explicitly ask for it. This makes things like multiplayer games, chat, and other services that require real-time exchange of information possible over a standard web protocol

There's a lot more technical history in that post covering how we modified NGINX to support a huge number of connections through port reuse. But the bottom line is that WebSockets are a vital technology for web sites that need to get real-time updates for features like social feeds, multimedia chat, collaborative editing, multi-player gaming, stock updates, and more.

Because the WebSocket protocol creates a single connection and doesn’t require HTTP requests, WebSockets can provide anywhere from 500:1 to a 1000:1 reduction in unnecessary HTTP header traffic, compared to HTTP polling solutions.

The server no longer needs to wait for a request to come back before it sends new data; it can simply push the data to the client the moment it has new information. Tests have shown a 3:1 reduction in latency compared to other polling solutions.

Last week, we expanded our deep support for HTTP/2 to include Server Push. HTTP/2 was finalized as a spec in 2015, so almost a newborn child as technologies go. (We're excited to help HTTP/2 grow up fast.)

By comparison, WebSockets is already a toddler, as RFC 6455 was finalized in 2011.

But, perhaps because of complexity or expense, WebSockets hasn't seen as wide adoption as we'd expect. CloudFlare is removing those obstacles, and frankly we're curious to see what happens.

We are building a better Internet, and while that may sound like a platitude... making modern tech easy to use matters. We're eager to see what our customers do to play, grow, and thrive with another tool available.

Read more about WebSockets generally, or review details in our support article.

We're big fans of HTTP/2 at Cloudflare. Our customers make up the majority of HTTP/2 enabled domains today. HTTP/2 is a key part of the modern web, and its growth and adoption is changing how websites and applications are built.

On Thursday April 28, 2016, our friends at CatchPoint are hosting a live AMA (Ask Me Anything) with experts from CloudFlare, Akamai, and Google answering questions in real time about the protocol's features, adoption, and future.

When: Thursday April 28, 2016 from 2pm-3pm Eastern Time (1600-1700 UTC)

How: Ask questions ahead of time (and vote on questions). Join in real-time on Thursday.

Who: Cloudflare's own Suzanne Aldrich will join Ilya Grigorik from Google, Tim Kadlec from Akamai, and Andrew Smirnov from Catchpoint.

Need the basics on HTTP/2 ahead of time? Visit the Cloudflare HTTP/2 website.

We're inviting these hosted customers: don't wait...migrate your site to CloudFlare for global acceleration (and more) right now.

CC BY 2.0 image by RogerAs TechCrunch wrote: "In many ways, PageSpeed Service is similar to what CloudFlare does but without the focus on security."

PageSpeed started as — and continues — as a Google-created software module for the Apache webserver to rewrite webpages to reduce latency and bandwidth, to help make the web faster.

Google introduced their hosted PageSpeed Service in July 2011, to save webmasters the hassle of installing the software module.

It's the hosted service that is being discontinued.

CloudFlare provides similar capabilities to PageSpeed, such as minification, image compression, and asynchronous loading.

Additionally, CloudFlare offers more performance gains through a global network footprint, Railgun for dynamic content acceleration, built-in SPDY support, and more.

PageSpeed Service customers care about performance, and CloudFlare delivers. CloudFlare also includes security, SSL, DNS, and more, at all plans, including Free.

There's no need to install any software or change your host. CloudFlare works at the network level, with a five minute sign up process.

Here's simple instructions for migrating from the hosted PageSpeed Service to CloudFlare.

](https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/tinfoil_security)

We’re pleased to introduce a new CloudFlare App: Tinfoil Security. Tinfoil Security is a service designed to find possible web application vulnerabilities.

Security is central to CloudFlare's service. Our security features operate at the network level to identify and block malicious traffic from ever reaching your website or application. However, even with that protection in place, it’s still worth fixing problems at the application layer as well.

Tinfoil Security helps website owners learn about possible vulnerabilities in their applications by scanning for vulnerabilities, tests all access points, and providing step-by-step introductions on eliminating threats if found.

Detail of an individual vulnerability report.

Their developer-focused reports can be tied into continuous integration lifecycle with API hooks for kicking off new scans after changes are made.

Tinfoil offers several price points, including a free plan that checks for XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) concerns. The Tinfoil app is a quick and easy addition to your CloudFlare service. Take a look!

The extra speed and security CloudFlare delivers are helpful for search engine ranking, but there are many other factors, including site content, organization and proper promotion.

The newest CloudFlare App, Cle rspike automates the search engine optimization (SEO) process to help your website attract more organic search engine traffic.

We know you cared enough to make your website faster and safer. Improving your SEO is a complementary step, and we're pleased to make it easy to use the Clearspike service and tap into the expertise of the Clearspike team for additional benefits.

Like other CloudFlare Apps, Clearspike is easy to activate, with different levels of service available immediately, and no long-term commitment.

• Self-Service Plan: Get custom recommendations and update website yourself. $24 / month.

• Automated Plan: Use Clearspike tools to get website optimized automatically. $49 / month.

• Do-It-For-Me Plan: Get Clearspike experts to optimize your website. $199 / month.

There's no tricks: the experts at Clearspike capture a wealth of experience in an easy-to-use service which makes their expertise usable and easy to apply.

At every level of service, Clearspike actively reviews your site for possible improvements, making recommendations and giving you tools to take action. The service includes keyword recommendations, page title optimizations, submission to appropriate directories, finding broken links, checking sitemaps and more. Clearspike helps you measure your progress, too, so you can see the return on your investment in SEO.

P.S. Clearspike made their service available to CloudFlare customers using the app development platform.

CloudFlare is hiring to extend the platform.

](https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/iubenda)Almost every website needs a privacy policy. In most countries, it's legally required, and it helps build trust with visitors. But without a lawyer on your team, writing a policy that meets your legal requirements can be challenging. What's even harder is avoiding jargon and writing a policy that's easy to read and understand.

If your site's privacy policy doesn't clear these high bars, we encourage you to try the newest CloudFlare App from iubenda. The iubenda team keeps up with worldwide policies and requirements, and has worked with lawyers to make generating a privacy policy simple. They capture your site's needs in an easy-to-read document that's easy to update without recoding your site.

The iubenda approach also radically reduces the cost: you'll have a clear policy maintained by a legal team for only $2.25/month/site.

We'd never envisioned a privacy policy App, but we're thrilled with the fit for many CloudFlare customers. Big companies have legal teams and have privacy policies, small companies (and some medium ones) need privacy policies, but certainly don't have legal teams.

We are excited to offer a service like iubenda which shares the CloudFlare ethos of bringing the tools of the Internet giants within reach of every website online.

iubenda lets website owners generate a privacy policy within seconds, beautifully designed, customized on needs and remotely maintained by a legal team. As you turn on the iubenda App, a minimal privacy policy will be added to your website as a badge attached to the lower border.

You customize and extend the privacy policy to match your practices using the iubenda step-by-step tools. Of course, you can integrate the policy in different ways, turning off the badge and presenting different integrations following iubenda's clear instructions.

We're proud to have iubenda's privacy policy service available now to all CloudFlare customers.

When iubenda reached out to CloudFlare, it became clear that -- given their interesting service and technical savvy -- iubenda was a clear fit for building their App via our new packaged approach, which gives the developer more control over the resources needed.

Here's a link to iubenda's GitHub repo for their integration, following the guidelines documented here.

We encourage other interested developers to consider this approach of putting their service or website utility into the CloudFlare Apps marketplace where it can be instantly turned on by hundreds of thousands of CloudFlare customers.

At CloudFlare, we're interested in making running a website easier. That's a broad definition, on purpose, going far beyond security and performance.

If your goal is making money from your website, we want to make that easier, too.

So we're pleased to introduce Infolinks to CloudFlare customers. Available now, the Infolinks app will automatically add in-text ads to your website.

Infolinks turns keywords into relevant ads, which only trigger when a website visitor hovers over the link, as in the screenshot below. Infolinks operates in real time, extracting content and determining intent. The automatically-created in-text ads overcome "banner blindness" delivering a richer experience for your visitors right on your website. You earn revenue when your visitors click on the ads. Monthly payments are sent to your bank or PayPal account.

To enable Infolinks, you don't need to change the layout of your site.Instead, turn on the app in your CloudFlare dashboard, and upon approval, the Infolinks code will be applied by CloudFlare to your sites, automatically turning keywords into relevant ads.

• Infolinks is appropriate for publishers with rich content.

• Infolinks is not compatible with every website. Websites with adult or offensive content are not allowed. Every website goes through a manual review process by the Infolinks team.

• Turn on the Infolinks app today and start making money from your website with in-text ads.

At CloudFlare, we think a lot about the Domain Name Service -- better known as DNS, the Internet's address book. CloudFlare uses DNS to bring performance and security to our customers. But, we don't spend a lot of time talking about our DNS service, behind the scenes.

One recent customer comment reminded us of an unsung advantage:

_"The thing is, we had this new design running on a QA server for the past week, doing final testing and updating. Yesterday we changed the IP to point the domain to the new QA server, away from the "old" prod server.

BUT unlike every other time when we change a site's IP - the change was instantaneous‚ since the only IP the world has for our sites is CloudFlare, so when we change servers, IPs, etc.

So with CloudFlare, instant server move, web host move, IP change -- never deal with DNS propagation again. That is awesome."_

Because the public IP addresses don't change, using CloudFlare removes the wait for TTL (Time To Live) record expiration and DNS propagation when you make a change to one of your site's DNS records. This waiting period is often an excruciating part of development and deployment changes, because it's completely out of your control. Yes, you can lower your TTLs ahead of time, but it's still a seemingly endless wait for the world's recursive DNS servers to come get the new record.

If DNS isn't something you spend a lot of time thinking about, that's fine. Just know that once you're on CloudFlare, your changes are live faster, and you can get back to everything else on your plate. Making running a website easier...that's part of CloudFlare's goal, even in the small things.

P.S. - We recently made major improvements to our DNS management interface. You can also manage DNS via API.

This app started with a casual request on Tuesday, March 27th, in a public CloudFlare support thread.

I think it would be great if CloudFlare had an app to aid in Earth Hour this upcoming Saturday, March 31 @ 8:30 PM. It's not too late to join in on the effort!

Time was too short for CloudFlare to help, based on other projects. But — just in case — I mentioned the alpha version of our developer platform. Katie G., a developer in the UK, warned that she was busy with lots of work and other projects, but ended with:

I'll still try to do it though in time for Earth Hour.

Last night — about 48 hours later — Earth Hour was made available to all CloudFlare customers as a free CloudFlare app!

Turn on the app, and for one hour on March 31 (today, for some; tomorrow for many) your site will go dark and present a message to the site visitor explaining Earth Hour. The app offers site owners the chance to "Save the world, 60 minutes every 365 days at a time."

We applaud Katie for her quick work, and her questions during development have helped us improve the platform already.

More info coming soon about this developer platform. But the impatient can follow links in this thread. If you'd like to develop an app, let us know. Developers can build globally-deployable apps for CloudFlare-powered sites, with no operation costs, to join the existing CloudFlare apps. That's just the beginning.

It's easy to observe Earth Hour, no matter your time zone.

So, when the management team at Khataland.com got the call that Jill Martin was going to feature one of their products in the Steals & Deals promotion on Tuesday, January 24, they were excited. And then they got to work.[

](http://www.khataland.com/)

NBC editors tell featured companies to expect up to 100,000 hits in the span of a few minutes after the TV segment airs, with follow-on spikes as the show airs in each successive time zone. So the team at Khataland got in touch with CoreCommerce, who runs their online store, and made some plans to handle the expected surge.

Those plans quickly involved CloudFlare.

CloudFlare works in cooperation with any webserver or platform to make sure websites are safe, fast, and available. There's no relationship required between CloudFlare and your host, but it doesn't hurt that CloudFlare and CoreCommerce serve several customers together. For instance, earlier this month, Benderbound enjoyed the combination to make sure their site was fast and available during a smaller TODAY Show appearance.

So, when Khataland asked CoreCommerce for help, they recommended CloudFlare.

Here's how Brandon Wanamaker, from the quality assurance team, put it:

We always do our best to provide top-tier service to our customers at the product and customer experience levels. CloudFlare allows us to multiply our efforts to speed up the software; reduces the merchant's expense by absorbing a very large majority of bandwidth usage; and protects higher profile, or otherwise unfortunate, targets of a denial of service attack and other malicious traffic. The more merchants on our system using CloudFlare, the faster and safer the CoreCommerce system is. Shoppers are less likely to abandon their shopping carts on a faster site. Merchants avoid huge bandwidth usage and possibly overages. Finally, it makes our lives a little easier when the system is running smoothly. It's changed how we handle stores featured on a national TV broadcast, with potential surge in traffic. We insist on CloudFlare to keep their stores and CoreCommerce running quickly, with no hiccups. With such huge exposure, downtime is not an option, and in every case, CloudFlare has never failed. And the setup is way too simple for something that does so much. Registration, a few clicks and you're done! I can't say enough good things about the experience the CoreCommerce team and our merchants have had working with CloudFlare.

The team at Khataland signed up for CloudFlare directly, changed their nameservers, and ordered CloudFlare Pro to secure transactions with Full SSL. Everything was in place in under an hour, letting the Khataland and CoreCommerce team focus on other preparations for making a whole bunch of brand-new customers happy.

Here's what Khataland shared:

We had huge interest from Today Show viewers. In the first hour after the show, we had more than 60,000 views and sold more than half of our special packages for the show. Our website remained up and functioning during this huge spike.

See the spike for yourself, starting in the largest viewership (Eastern Time) with each time zone providing another bump an hour later.

Brandon on the CoreCommerce team tweeted about the resources saved.

Here's a more graphical view from the CloudFlare dashboard, showing thesavings.

Surges in traffic come for many reasons beyond TV promotion, from the Halloween holiday, a pre-Christmas sale, or simply Groundhog Day (next week!). CloudFlare's ability to deliver information quickly to your visitors without overloading your webserver becomes dramatically important during these surges.

But a fast, always available, secure website is important every day, so sign up for CloudFlare now.

ShareAndTell Pro is a social sweepstakes and rewards platform that lets you set up giveaways on your website and Facebook page. ShareAndTell Pro is now available as a CloudFlare App.

When you run a sweepstakes, deciding to give away a phone or tablet to incent your customers to follow you on Twitter or Like your company on Facebook is just the beginning. What comes next is managing compliance with individual state laws, following compliance with rules (Facebook has more regulations than some governments!), tracking your entrants properly, monitoring the dates, and following through with winners to deliver prizes...all while doing your other work.

ShareAndTell Pro makes sweepstakes easy to run without getting bogged down in operational details you never even considered. Use the ShareAndTell Pro service, and your sweepstakes adds to your bottom line instead of pulling you into a morass.

At CloudFlare, we bring the tools of the Internet giants to the web at large. ShareAndTell Pro has a similar approach. The same platform available now as a CloudFlare App powers big sweepstakes for big brands. Check out these examples: Fight Club, The Hangover, Bridesmaids, and the Game Show Network's Family Reunion Sweepstakes.

The step-by-step sweepstakes builder makes it easy to set up a promotion, rewarding visitors with entries when they follow you on Twitter, Like you on Facebook, comment, answer survey questions, and more. You also may reward participants with coupon codes. All of this functionality is coupled with full analytics to track your promotion in real time, including where sharing happens and what website traffic is coming from the endorsements.

As a CloudFlare customer, you turn on ShareAndTell Pro from your CloudFlare dashboard for $20/month (Basic plan). Instantly, the ShareAndTell Pro widget appears on your website, with an active promotion for one of the ShareAndTell Pro prizes (no extra charge!) for visitors who share your site with others. For example, through January 31, 2012, the default prize is a Samsung Galaxy Tablet. Last month was a Kindle Fire.

When you decide to set up your own promotion, with your own prizes, the default offering is seamlessly replaced by your custom giveaway. You can customize the appearance and action of the widget.

Making your job easier is priceless, and ShareAndTell Pro removes the hassle from encouraging your customers to interact with your site and share your brand.

Add ShareAndTell Pro now and you'll be running a sweepstakes on your site in minutes.

Since its June introduction as a CloudFlare App, Apture's contextual search service has been popular. Thousands of CloudFlare customers installed the app.

In November, we heard that Apture was shutting down their service, as part of their acquisition by Google. Good for them, but we thought immediately "What can we do for CloudFlare site owners?"

Our first instinct was to look around for a replacement service, or more than one, but no obvious alternative emerged. And Apture's deadline for turning the service off was set to Tuesday, December 20.

What to do?

Three folks on the CloudFlare team -- Ram, Chris, and Kevin -- decided they could make something similar and useful, given a little bit of time. Offered a single day, as a mini-hackathon, the enthusiastic trio agreed. Our positive experience with larger hackathons helped set the model and expectations.

On December 7, Ram, Chris and Kevin closed the door of a conference room and ignored the rest of the team. They started with pastries and coffee. A clean whiteboard was quickly filled.

Later in the day, brief interruptions were tolerated for delivery of burritos and Red Bull.

The team combined several technologies, internal and external, to deliver a simple, polished experience. Free APIs from Bing and DuckDuckGo were explored and put to use. CloudFlareJS as a JavaScript loader made performance straightforward.

Many additional ideas were discussed, but 12 hours isn't much time. The team decided on delivering the core functions of web search, definitions, and (a nice touch) incorporating the "read aloud" benefits of Pronounce, an existing CloudFlare app.

It was a long day, but ultimately successful for Ram, Chris, and Kevin. And for CloudFlare customers.

Highlight is a one-click install on your CloudFlare-powered site. Highlight gives your site visitors contextual web search and definitions -- and no one needs to leave your site.

Visitors select a word or phrase, and a quiet tooltip appears, inviting them to seek more info or simply listen to the word or phrase read out loud.

CloudFlare customers looking to replace Apture simply need to turn on Highlight.

Not yet a CloudFlare customer? Take five minutes and sign up for CloudFlare. And then use CloudFlare Apps to install Highlight as a worthy replacement to Apture.

It's almost time at CloudFlare headquarters, in San Francisco, California, USA, to celebrate Thanksgiving. This holiday brings together family and friends to enjoy a meal and remember the people and events for which we are grateful.

We can't invite each member of our community to join us for Thanksgiving dinner, but we are grateful that so many worldwide are using CloudFlare to make their sites faster and safer. We serve a global community, with a global network, and we remember that every day, not just the holidays.

To make our service more accessible to this worldwide community, CloudFlare uses the Smartling platform to offer our website in 31 languages, all available from the menu at the bottom right of CloudFlare.com pages. Each language starts with machine translation, and then, using the Smartling in-page tools, the community goes to work.

In the few months since we began this community translation effort, our customers have translated 20,000 words in 16 languages. That's amazing.

Nearly 100 CloudFlare customers have translated portions of our website. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we recognize a few of the most prolific translators here, in no particular order.

• Mohammed Alamri

• Raquel Santos and Mariana Gaspar

• Mosi Wang

• SecNews Management Team

• Ardha Gp

• Emil Stahl Pedersen

• Cyrille Dumortier

• Heiko Rittelmeier

• Jorim Sint

• Bazyli Brzóska

• Gyönki Bendegúz

There are many others, not all of whom wanted to be recognized publicly. We're grateful to each one, and to Smartling for making this process simple for both the translator and site owner alike.

This same translation tool is available for your website on CloudFlare via the Smartlingapp.

Like to help us improve our global voice? Go to translate.cloudflare.com and register with your language(s).

For those celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, enjoy your turkey dinner and your time with family and friends. For the rest of the world -- including our Canadian customers who enjoyed Thanksgiving several weeks ago -- many thanks for helping make CloudFlare grow all around the world, in every language.

Thanks to Dain Kennison for the image.

How much do you appreciate your site's visitors? With the newest CloudFlare app, you can show them.

PunchTab instantly adds a loyalty and reward program to your site, for free.

Visitors connect to your PunchTab-powered platform via Facebook. Regular visits earn your loyal visitors points every single day. Are they more involved? More points are awarded for commenting, sharing via Twitter, liking on Facebook, or giving you the Google +1 for new content.

Beyond these common actions, you can incent your customers to complete other custom actions, via the PunchTab SDK (software development kit).

Right out of the gate, your customers can choose from a catalog of gift cards from top brands around the internet as soon as they earn enough points.

Once you're ready, you can create a custom catalog, with incentives specific to your customers.

PunchTab is available for free on one domain.

Turning on PunchTab viaCloudFlare will instantly start your loyalty program, placing the red "rewards tab" in the position of your choice on your website within seconds.

CloudFlare protects your website, scrubbing your web traffic from unwanted visitors and attacks. But not all traffic to a server is web traffic. For instance, SSH, FTP and other administrative ports may be needed at different times. But, every open port is a potential vector for attack, so these ports require thought, care and control.

Our newest CloudFlare App partner, Dome9, has a complementary solution aimed at these non-web ports. They're providing server security management as a service, so you can close all administrative ports easily and completely, by default.

With Dome9's Secure Access Lease™, you can open servers on-demand for the right people, for a defined amount of time, with an audit trail. The service helps you manage both internal access and third-party developer rights.

Like all CloudFlare Apps, Dome9 is easy to turn on in your CloudFlare dashboard. For $20/month, you can manage and control access to 1 server, with 2 administrators. Additional servers and administrators can be added thereafter. Dome9 requires a lightweight install of the Dome9 Agent on your Windows or Linux server, whether hosted or cloud or virtual private server (VPS). The Dome9 Agent is available at Dome9 Central, immediately after account creation via CloudFlare.

One important note: Dome9 is not available for shared hosting environments at this time.

Set up Dome9 today, and start automating secure access for all your hosted and cloud servers.

Blitz.io is a self service load and performance testing platform. It's a new offering from Mu Dynamics, leaders in the application testing space, and we're thrilled to make Blitz instantly available to CloudFlare customers right now as a CloudFlare App.

This CloudFlare App appeals mostly to developers, but even less technical members of the CloudFlare team (like me) enjoyed learning about Blitz.io's capabilities and running some tests. There's a reason Blitz.io calls testing Play.

Blitz.io offers a developer-friendly command line user experience. This interface deliberately isn't point and click, since keyboard control gives savvy customers an efficient way to run familiar commands with the power of Blitz at their fingers. The reports, though, are presented visually, for full pattern-recognition power -- see examples below.

We learned about Blitz.io because an early Blitz.io customer tried to load test a site on CloudFlare. Our security throttled and blocked the test automatically, which protected our customers. However, we believe in services which make a website owner's job easier, and load and performance testing are part of the toolkit. So, after an exchange of tweets and emails, we agreed to work with the Blitz.io team to make their new service an integrated option for CloudFlare customers.

Turn on Blitz.io in your CloudFlare dashboard, and follow the link to Blitz.io. You'll be automatically signed in, and ready to play. We're starting with a free plan, for testing up to 500 concurrent users. Higher volume paid plans are coming soon.

If using Blitz load testing to test a site protected by CloudFlare, note that Blitz load testing ("rushes") will need to be directed to your origin server, so you can learn the real baseline limits of your application. These results will not reflect CloudFlare acceleration, nor will CloudFlare security block the test.

Once you discover the limits of your application, you can be confident that CloudFlare will improve its performance from that baseline. CloudFlare's delivery of static content from its global network frees up server resources and connections for use by your application, so you can wrangle more performance out of the same setup.

These two screenshots of Blitz.io reports show a rush for a single image (same one in both tests) from Blitz.io's California region, with the origin server in California. The first one is without CloudFlare, and hovers around 300ms. The second is with CloudFlare, and is less than 20ms. This isn't an application, but still interesting results.

With Blitz's command line interface, no scripting is required. You can run your tests from multiple continents. Finally, Blitz is easy to integrate in your deployment process: there's a robust API, with support already available for Ruby, Java, Python, node.js and more.

We encourage you to use Blitz.io to make performance testing fun and easy.

Early Saturday afternoon, hundreds of hackers filled tables in a cavernous building in San Francisco, staking out their power cords and testing the Internet connection. This was the start of TechCrunch Disrupt's 2011 SF hackathon. CloudFlare jumped in to sponsor pizza and a $1,000 prize for the best CloudFlare App created during the hackathon.

Eight members of the CloudFlare team were there during the event to support hackers, answer questions about our new developers site, and hand out pizza.

CloudFlare pizza plate

After watching 130 one minute presentations, CloudFlare couldn't stop smiling at one demonstration.

A team from Hungary decided to think small, with an elegant game played only in the 16x16 pixel space commonly occupied by the favicon, the tiny image in a browser tab. Among an audience of their developer peers, the game from the United Task team earned applause, laughs and some gasps for their original name, which abbreviated "FAvorite Game icon."

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince was pleased to hand over the big money (literally) and name this hack as the winner of CloudFlare's $1,000 cash prize.

Quickly, the team turned their hack into a new CloudFlare App, available for free to all CloudFlare site owners. The App, named Favris, turns your favicon into a small tribute to the world's favorite block game.

[

](https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/favris)

We first met the United Task team after they presented their hack. Since Sunday, we've had a chance to welcome three members of their team to the CloudFlare office, and asked Hagyma a few questions.

While doing serious stuff, we sometimes have crazy things in mind. One of us Gabor was reading about html canvas, and told us about it. Shortly we knew, we have something for the HACKATHON!

We mostly worked against each other, we set in front of just one laptop and shouting at whoever was typing. One of us [Kescke] was unable to come to TCD, he was probably the most effective from overseas.

It took more than we thought, but thank God, we didn't have to present before noon on Sunday. :)

We are a webapp dev company from Budapest, Hungary. We did many things for clients, and decided to go on with some of our ideas as a startup. Since we don't have experience, we wanted to see how things are going in the valley.

Install Favris on your CloudFlare-powered site today, for free.

At CloudFlare, we appreciate deep technology applied to solve hard problems in an easy-to-use manner. Our newest CloudFlare App, does just that: Haileo helps you make money from your images and videos.

Contextually matching advertising to your site's image and video inventory is a complicated problem to solve. Haileo applies its detection and classification algorithms to understand multimedia the way people do. Then, Haileo serves appropriate ad content.

Fortunately, all that technology works without any extra work by you, the website owner. Simply turn on Haileo via CloudFlare Apps, and, if approved, your site's multimedia inventory can include contextual advertising, giving you an additional revenue stream.

We're thrilled to be Haileo's first platform partner for their proprietary technology, and the easiest way to integrate their service for website owners.

Because of this early access, there is one important requirement: your website must have 200,000 pageviews/month in the United States to be considered for approval. If you don't meet that threshold now, please be patient. We expect to broaden the range in the future.

The review process takes no more than two business days. Approved sites will have Haileo turned on automatically.

It's fun to introduce apps that make our customers money. We hope all qualified sites will apply to start making extra money from their images and video. Try Haileo on your site today.

On this Friday afternoon, I want to share some exciting news and an interesting story. Let's start with the news.

CloudFlare has users all around the world and so we are thrilled to announce that our service is now available in 27 languages. Use the language selector at the bottom right of CloudFlare.com to switch to Norwegian or Indonesian or Portuguese (either in Brazil or Portugal) or many, many others. We're off to a great start in providing our global services in many of the world's native tongues thanks to our global community and the Smartling translation platform.

It gets even better: every CloudFlare user can now use the same Smartling translation platform as a CloudFlare App to translate their own website. Smartling's service is easy and powerful; I encourage everyone to try it now. There is both a full-featured free plan and a paid plan that starts at $99/month.

There is no better way to go multilingual than via the Smartling App*.

*(NOTE: This app is no longer available, but you can learn about their services on the Smartling website.)

And now the story.

On our home page, we promise "Give us five minutes and we'll supercharge your website." In English, "supercharge" emphasizes speed and power. We feel it describes the combined benefits of performance, security and apps in one powerful word. The literal meaning, coming from the automotive world, is to"supply with extra energy or power." That is what we do for websites on our network.

But not every language packs the same multiple meanings into the same terms. One of our Norwegian community members shared the following earlier this week:

The word "supercharge" simply does not exist in Norwegian, and havetrouble translating it to something similar without knowing a bit more about your intentions with this word. I have assumed that you use this word both to describe the speed, the added control, security and your apps. Is this the case, or am I overanalyzing, and it's really just about the speed? A supercharger makes a car go faster, as far as I know. It would help me a lot if you could provide me with some synonyms or rewrites of this phrase that you're OK with, so that I can be sure that I'm not altering your message in any way. The word I've chosen so far, "overraske", translates back to English as "surprise", but the literal meaning in Norwegian is "over-fast", i.e. superfast.

It's the only single Norwegian word I can think of that remotely covers all bases (i.e. you get speed and some nice "surprises" in the added security and features), but I'm not really happy with it, sinceit's not given that all Norwegians will understand that there is a double-meaning.

Wow. That kind of attention to detail thrills. After an exchange, we agreed he would translate the more direct "Give us five minutes and we'll make your website faster and more secure." The result? "Gi oss fem minutter, og vi øker hastigheten og sikkerheten på ditt nettsted" (See for yourself).

In one week, our home website has been translated to 27 languages. Wow! Our multilingual websites will continue to improve each day with every new word and phrase translated with our community's help.

The best part? If you see a problem, you can help by flagging it or fixing it by suggesting an alternative. Visit translate.cloudflare.com and register as a volunteer translator, detailing which languages you speak. Once approved, you're free to update and edit anything you see on the CloudFlare language sites. Your contribution will be seen by every other community member.

Smartling is making their platform available as a CloudFlare App for free to sites with limited language-specific traffic for three languages. If you've never had a language site, then you probably fit this category -- and it's a fantastic on-ramp for you to reach a new part of your audience in their native tongue.

Try the Smartling App and see for yourself. We enjoy the on-page tools for translators, the admin tools for review and approval, and the SEO-friendly nature of the translations.

And we love talking to our global audience in their native tongue.