Today, we're excited to showcase another similar story: Meter, a provider of Internet infrastructure, is leveraging the Tenant API integration for DNS filtering to help their clients enforce acceptable Internet use policies.

Meter, headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2015, provides Internet infrastructure that includes routing, switching, wireless, and applications. They help deliver faster, more efficient, more secure networking experiences for a diverse range of corporate spaces, including offices, warehouses, retail, manufacturing, biotech, and education institutions.

Meter integrates with the Cloudflare Tenant API to provide DNS filtering to their customers. With the Meter dashboard, Meter customers can set policies to block or allow Internet traffic to domains, categorized by security risks (phishing, malware, DGA, etc.) or content theme (adult, gambling, shopping, etc.)

Across this customer base, having parent-child relationships in security policies is often critical. For example, specific schools within an overall district may have different policies about what Internet browsing is or is not acceptable.

Cloudflare’s parent-child configurability means that Meter administrators are equipped to set differential, granular policies for specific offices, retail locations, or warehouses (‘child accounts’) within a larger business (‘parent account’). DNS queries are first filtered against parent account policies before filtering against more specific child account policies.

At a more technical level, each “child” customer account can have its own users and tokens to manage accounts. Customers of Meter can set up their DNS endpoints via Gateway locations and may be defined as IPv4, IPv6, DoH, and DoT endpoints. DNS policies can be defined for these Gateway locations. In addition to this, each customer of Meter can customize their block page and even upload their own certificates to serve their custom block page.

MSPs and infrastructure companies like Meter play a vital role in bringing cybersecurity solutions to customers of all sizes and needs. Cloudflare will continue to invest in our tenant architecture to equip MSPs with the flexibility and simplicity they need to serve their end customers.

DNS filtering to protect users on the Internet is a valuable solution for MSPs to deliver with Cloudflare. But DNS filtering is just the first of several Zero Trust services that Cloudflare intends to support via our tenant platform, so stay tuned for more.

If you are an MSP or an Infrastructure company looking to deliver Cloudflare security for your end customers, learn more here.

2023 was the first year that non-participating countries could vote for their favorites during the Eurovision Song Contest, adding millions of additional viewers and voters to an already impressive 162 million tuning in from the participating countries. It became a truly global event with a potential for disruption from multiple sources. To prepare for anything, Cloudflare helped scale and protect the voting application, used by millions of dedicated fans around the world to choose the winner.

In this blog we will cover how once.net built their platform based.io to monitor, manage and scale the Eurovision voting application to handle all traffic using many Cloudflare services. The speed with which DNS changes made through the Cloudflare API propagate globally allowed them to scale their backend within seconds. At the same time, Cloudflare Pages was ready to serve any amount of traffic to the voting landing page so fans didn’t miss a beat. And to cap it off, by combining Cloudflare CDN, DDoS protection, WAF, and Turnstile, they made sure that attackers didn’t steal any of the limelight.

Based.io is a resilient live data platform built by the once.net team, with the capability to scale up to 400 million concurrent connected users. It’s built from the ground up for speed and performance, consisting of an observable real time graph database, networking layer, cloud functions, analytics and infrastructure orchestration. Since all system information, traffic analysis and disruptions are monitored in real time, it makes the platform instantly responsive to variable demand, which enables real time scaling of your infrastructure during spikes, outages and attacks.

Although the based.io platform on its own is currently in closed beta, it is already serving a few flagship customers in production assisted by the software and services of the once.net team. One such customer is Tally, a platform used by multiple broadcasters in Europe to add live interaction to traditional television. Over 100 live shows have been performed using the platform. Another is Airhub, a startup that handles and logs automatic drone flights. And of course the star of this blog post, the Eurovision Song Contest.

The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the world’s most popular broadcasted contests, and this year it reached 162 million people across 38 broadcasting countries. In addition, on TikTok the three live shows were viewed 4.8 million times, while 7.6 million people watched the Grand Final live on YouTube. With such an audience, it is no surprise that Cloudflare sees the impact of it on the Internet. Last year, we wrote a blog post where we showed lower than average traffic during, and higher than average traffic after the grand final. This year, the traffic from participating countries showed an even more remarkable surge:

HTTP Requests per Second from Norway, with a similar pattern visible in countries such as the UK, Sweden and France. Internet traffic spiked at 21:20 UTC, when voting started.

Such large amounts of traffic are nothing new to the Eurovision Song Contest. Eurovision has relied on Cloudflare’s services for over a decade now and Cloudflare has helped to protect Eurovision.tv and improve its performance through noticeable faster load time to visitors from all corners of the world. Year after year, the team of Eurovision continued to use our services more, discovering additional features to improve performance and reliability further, with increasingly fine-grained control over their traffic flows. Eurovision.tv uses Page Rules to cache additional content on Cloudflare’s edge, speeding up delivery without sacrificing up-to-the-minute updates during the global event. Finally, to protect their backend and content management system, the team has placed their admin portals behind Cloudflare Zero Trust to delegate responsibilities down to individual levels.

Since then the contest itself has also evolved – sometimes by choice, sometimes by force. During the COVID-19 pandemic in-person cheering became impossible for many people due to a reduced live audience, resulting in the Eurovision Song Contest asking once.net to build a new iOS and Android application in which fans could cheer virtually. The feature was an instant hit, and it was clear that it would become part of this year’s contest as well.

A screenshot of the official Eurovision Song Contest application showing the real-time number of connected fans (1) and allowing them to cheer (2) for their favorites.

In 2023, once.net was also asked to handle the paid voting from the regions where phone and SMS voting was not possible. It was the first time that Eurovision allowed voting online. The challenge that had to be overcome was the extreme peak demand on the platform when the show was live, and especially when the voting window started.

Complicating it further, was the fact that during last year’s show, there had been a large number of targeted and coordinated attacks.

To prepare for these spikes in demand and determined adversaries, once.net needed a platform that isn’t only resilient and highly scalable, but could also act as a mitigation layer in front of it. once.net selected Cloudflare for this functionality and integrated Cloudflare deeply with its real-time monitoring and management platform. To understand how and why, it’s essential to understand based.io underlying architecture.

Instead of relying on network or HTTP load balancers, based.io uses a client-side service discovery pattern, selecting the most suitable server to connect to and leveraging Cloudflare's fast cache propagation infrastructure to handle spikes in traffic (both malicious and benign).

First, each server continuously registers a unique access key that has an expiration of 15 seconds, which must be used when a client connects to the server. In addition, the backend servers register their health (such as active connections, CPU, memory usage, requests per second, etc.) to the service registry every 300 milliseconds. Clients then request the optimal server URL and associated access key from a central discovery registry and proceed to establish a long lived connection with that server. When a server gets overloaded it will disconnect a certain amount of clients and those clients will go through the discovery process again.

The central discovery registry would normally be a huge bottleneck and attack target. based.io resolves this by putting the registry behind Cloudflare's global network with a cache time of three seconds. Since the system relies on real-time stats to distribute load and uses short lived access keys, it is crucial that the cache updates fast and reliably. This is where Cloudflare’s infrastructure proved its worth, both due to the fast updating cache and reducing load with Tiered Caching.

Not using load balancers means the based.io system allows clients to connect to the backend servers through Cloudflare, resulting in  better performance and a more resilient infrastructure by eliminating the load balancers as potential attack surface. It also results in a better distribution of connections, using the real-time information of server health, amount of active connections, active subscriptions.

Scaling up the platform happens automatically under load by deploying additional machines that can each handle 40,000 connected users. These are spun up in batches of a couple of hundred and as each machine spins up, it reaches out directly to the Cloudflare API to configure its own DNS record and proxy status. Thanks to Cloudflare’s high speed DNS system, these changes are then propagated globally within seconds, resulting in a total machine turn-up time of around three seconds. This means faster discovery of new servers and faster dynamic rebalancing from the clients. And since the voting window of the Eurovision Song Contest is only 45 minutes, with the main peak within minutes after the window opens, every second counts!

High level architecture of the based.io platform used for the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest‌ ‌

To vote, users of the mobile app and viewers globally were pointed to the voting landing page, esc.vote. Building a frontend web application able to handle this kind of an audience is a challenge in itself. Although hosting it yourself and putting a CDN in front seems straightforward, this still requires you to own, configure and manage your origin infrastructure. once.net decided to leverage Cloudflare’s infrastructure directly by hosting the voting landing page on Cloudflare Pages. Deploying was as quick as a commit to their Git repository, and they never had to worry about reachability or scaling of the webpage.

once.net also used Cloudflare Turnstile to protect their payment API endpoints that were used to validate online votes. They used the invisible Turnstile widget to make sure the request was not coming from emulated browsers (e.g. Selenium). And best of all, using the invisible Turnstile widget the user did not have to go through extra steps, which allowed for a better user experience and better conversion.

After the two semi-finals went according to plan with approximately 200,000 concurrent users during each,May 13 brought the Grand Final. The once.net team made sure that there were enough machines ready to take the initial load, jumped on a call with Cloudflare to monitor and started looking at the number of concurrent users slowly increasing. During the event, there were a few attempts to DDoS the site, which were automatically and instantaneously mitigated without any noticeable impact to any visitors.

The based.io discovery registry server also got some attention. Since the cache TTL was set quite low at five seconds, a high rate of distributed traffic to it could still result in a significant load. Luckily, on its own, the highly optimized based.io server can already handle around 300,000 requests per second. Still, it was great to see that during the event the cache hit ratio for normal traffic was 20%, and during one significant attack the cache hit ratio peaked towards 80%. This showed how easy it is to leverage a combination of Cloudflare CDN and DDoS protection to mitigate such attacks, while still being able to serve dynamic and real time content.

When the curtains finally closed, 1.3 million concurrent users connected to the based.io platform at peak. The based.io platform handled a total of 350 million events and served seven million unique users in three hours. The voting landing page hosted by Cloudflare Pages served 2.3 million requests per second at peak, and made sure that the voting payments were by real human fans using Turnstile. Although the Cloudflare platform didn’t blink for such a flood of traffic, it is no surprise that it shows up as a short crescendo in our traffic statistics:

If you’re also working on or with an application that would benefit from Cloudflare’s speed and security, but don’t know where to start, reach out and we’ll work together.

Earlier this year, we blogged about an incident where we mistakenly throttled a customer due to internal confusion about a potential violation of our Terms of Service. That incident highlighted a growing point of confusion for many of our customers. Put simply, our terms had not kept pace with the rapid innovation here at Cloudflare, especially with respect to our Developer Platform. We’re excited to announce new updates that will modernize our terms and cut down on customer confusion and frustration.

We want our terms to set clear expectations about what we’ll deliver and what customers can do with our services. But drafting terms is often an iterative process, and iteration over a decade can lead to bloat, complexity, and vestigial branches in need of pruning. Now, time to break out the shears.

To really nip this in the bud, we started at the source–the content-based restriction housed in Section 2.8 of our Self-Serve Subscription Agreement:

Cloudflare is much, much more than a CDN, but that wasn’t always the case. The CDN was one of our first services and originally designed to serve HTML content like webpages. User attempts to serve video and other large files hosted outside of Cloudflare were disruptive on many levels. So, years ago, we added Section 2.8 to give Cloudflare the means to preserve the original intent of the CDN: limiting use of the CDN to webpages.

Over time, Cloudflare’s network became larger and more robust and its portfolio broadened to include services like Stream, Images, and R2. These services are explicitly designed to allow customers to serve non-HTML content like video, images, and other large files hosted directly by Cloudflare. And yet, Section 2.8 persisted in our Self-Serve Subscription Agreement–the umbrella terms that apply to all services. We acknowledge that this didn’t make much sense.

To address the problem, we’ve done a few things. First, we moved the content-based restriction concept to a new CDN-specific section in our Service-Specific Terms. We want to be clear that this restriction only applies to use of our CDN. Next, we got rid of the antiquated HTML vs. non-HTML construct, which was far too broad. Finally, we made it clear that customers can serve video and other large files using the CDN so long as that content is hosted by a Cloudflare service like Stream, Images, or R2. This will allow customers to confidently innovate on our Developer Platform while leveraging the speed, security, and reliability of our CDN. Video and large files hosted outside of Cloudflare will still be restricted on our CDN, but we think that our service features, generous free tier, and competitive pricing (including zero egress fees on R2) make for a compelling package for developers that want to access the reach and performance of our network.

Here are a few diagrams to help understand how our terms of service fit together for various use cases.

Customer A is on a free, pro, or business plan and wants to use the CDN service:

Customer B is on a free, pro, or business plan and wants to use the Developer Platform and Zero Trust services:

Customer C is on a free, pro, or business plan and wants to use Stream with the CDN service and Web Application Firewall with the CDN service:

We also took this opportunity to tune up other aspects of our Terms of Service to make for a more user-first experience. For example, we streamlined our Self-Serve Subscription Agreement to make it clearer and easier to understand from the start.

We also heard previous complaints and removed an old restriction on benchmarking–we’re confident in the performance of our network and services, unlike some of our competitors. Last but not least, we renamed the Supplemental Terms to the Service-Specific Terms and gave them a major facelift to improve clarity and usability.

We’ve learned a lot from our users throughout this process, and we are always grateful for your feedback. Our terms were never meant to act as a gating mechanism that stifled innovation. With these updates, we hope that customers will feel confident in building the next generation of apps and services on Cloudflare. And we’ll keep the shears handy as we continue to work to help build a better Internet.

Over the years when Cloudflare has had an outage that affected our customers we have very quickly blogged about what happened, why, and what we are doing to address the causes of the outage. Today’s post is a little different. It’s about a single customer’s website not working correctly because of incorrect action taken by Cloudflare.

Although the customer was not in any way banned from Cloudflare, or lost access to their account, their website didn’t work. And it didn’t work because Cloudflare applied a bandwidth throttle between us and their origin server. The effect was that the website was unusable.

Because of this unusual throttle there was some internal confusion for our customer support team about what had happened. They, incorrectly, believed that the customer had been limited because of a breach of section 2.8 of our Self-Serve Subscription Agreement which prohibits use of our self-service CDN to serve excessive non-HTML content, such as images and video, without a paid plan that includes those services (this is, for example, designed to prevent someone building an image-hosting service on Cloudflare and consuming a huge amount of bandwidth; for that sort of use case we have paid image and video plans).

However, this customer wasn’t breaking section 2.8, and they were both a paying customer and a paying customer of Cloudflare Workers through which the throttled traffic was passing. This throttle should not have happened. In addition, there is and was no need for the customer to upgrade to some other plan level.

This incident has set off a number of workstreams inside Cloudflare to ensure better communication between teams, prevent such an incident happening, and to ensure that communications between Cloudflare and our customers are much clearer.

Before we explain our own mistake and how it came to be, we’d like to apologize to the customer. We realize the serious impact this had, and how we fell short of expectations. In this blog post, we want to explain what happened, and more importantly what we’re going to change to make sure it does not happen again.

On February 2, an on-call network engineer received an alert for a congesting interface with Equinix IX in our Ashburn data center. While this is not an unusual alert, this one stood out for two reasons. First, it was the second day in a row that it happened, and second, the congestion was due to a sudden and extreme spike of traffic.

The engineer in charge identified the customer’s domain, tardis.dev, as being responsible for this sudden spike of traffic between Cloudflare and their origin network, a storage provider. Because this congestion happens on a physical interface connected to external peers, there was an immediate impact to many of our customers and peers. A port congestion like this one typically incurs packet loss, slow throughput and higher than usual latency. While we have automatic mitigation in place for congesting interfaces, in this case the mitigation was unable to resolve the impact completely.

The traffic from this customer went suddenly from an average of 1,500 requests per second, and a 0.5 MB payload per request, to 3,000 requests per second (2x) and more than 12 MB payload per request (25x).

The congestion happened between Cloudflare and the origin network. Caching did not happen because the requests were all unique URLs going to the origin, and therefore we had no ability to serve from cache.

A Cloudflare engineer decided to apply a throttling mechanism to prevent the zone from pulling so much traffic from their origin. Let's be very clear on this action: Cloudflare does not have an established process to throttle customers that consume large amounts of bandwidth, and does not intend to have one. This remediation was a mistake, it was not sanctioned, and we deeply regret it.

We lifted the throttle through internal escalation 12 hours and 53 minutes after having set it up.

To make sure a similar incident does not happen, we are establishing clear rules to mitigate issues like this one. Any action taken against a customer domain, paying or not, will require multiple levels of approval and clear communication to the customer. Our tooling will be improved to reflect this. We have many ways of traffic shaping in situations where a huge spike of traffic affects a link and could have applied a different mitigation in this instance.

We are in the process of rewriting our terms of service to better reflect the type of services that our customers deliver on our platform today. We are also committed to explaining to our users in plain language what is permitted under self-service plans. As a developer-first company with transparency as one of its core principles, we know we can do better here. We will follow up with a blog post dedicated to these changes later.

Once again, we apologize to the customer for this action and for the confusion it created for other Cloudflare customers.

Here at Labyrinth Labs, we put great emphasis on monitoring. Having a working monitoring setup is a critical part of the work we do for our clients.

Cloudflare's Analytics dashboard provides a lot of useful information for debugging and analytics purposes for our customer Pixel Federation. However, it doesn’t automatically integrate with existing monitoring tools such as Grafana and Prometheus, which our DevOps engineers use every day to monitor our infrastructure.

Cloudflare provides a Logs API, but the amount of logs we’d need to analyze is so vast, it would be simply inefficient and too pricey to do so. Luckily, Cloudflare already does the hard work of aggregating our thousands of events per second and exposes them in an easy-to-use API.

Having Cloudflare’s data from our zones integrated with other systems’ metrics would give us a better understanding of our systems and the ability to correlate metrics and create more useful alerts, making our Day-2 operations (e.g. debugging incidents or analyzing the usage of our systems) more efficient.

Since our monitoring stack is primarily based on Prometheus and Grafana, we decided to implement our own Prometheus exporter that pulls data from Cloudflare’s GraphQL Analytics API.

Based on current cloud trends and our intention to use the exporter in Kubernetes, writing the code in Go was the obvious choice. Cloudflare provides an API SDK for Golang, so the common API tasks were made easy to start with.

We take advantage of Cloudflare’s GraphQL API to obtain analytics data about each of our zones and transform them into Prometheus metrics that are then exposed on a metrics endpoint.

We are able to obtain data about the total number and rate of requests, bandwidth, cache utilization, threats, SSL usage, and HTTP response codes. In addition, we are also able to monitor what type of content is being transmitted and what countries and locations the requests originate from.

All of this information is provided through the http1mGroups node in Cloudflare’s GraphQL API. If you want to see what Datasets are available, you can find a brief description at https://developers.cloudflare.com/analytics/graphql-api/features/data-sets.

On top of all of these, we can also obtain data for Cloudflare’s data centers. Our graphs can easily show the distribution of traffic among them, further helping in our evaluations. The data is obtained from the httpRequestsAdaptiveGroups node in GraphQL.

After running the queries against the GraphQL API, we simply format the results to follow the Prometheus metrics format and expose them on the /metrics endpoint. To make things faster, we use Goroutines and make the requests in parallel.

Our primary intention was to use the exporter in Kubernetes. Therefore, it comes with a Docker image and Helm chart to make deployments easier. You might need to adjust the Service annotations to match your Prometheus configuration.

The exporter itself exposes the gathered metrics on the /metrics endpoint. Therefore setting the Prometheus annotations either on the pod or a Kubernetes service will do the job.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  annotations:
    prometheus.io/path: /metrics
    prometheus.io/scrape: "true"

We plan on adding a Prometheus ServiceMonitor to the Helm chart to make scraping the exporter even easier for those who use the Prometheus operator in Kubernetes.

The configuration is quite easy, you just provide your API email and key. Optionally you can limit the scraping to selected zones only. Refer to our docs in the GitHub repo or see the example below.

 env:
   - name: CF_API_EMAIL
     value: <YOUR_API_EMAIL>
   - name: CF_API_KEY
     value: <YOUR_API_KEY>

  # Optionally, you can filter zones by adding IDs following the example below.
  # - name: ZONE_XYZ
  #   value: <zone_id>

To deploy the exporter with Helm you simply need to run:

helm repo add lablabs-cloudflare-exporter https://lablabs.github.io/cloudflare-exporter
helm repo update

helm install cloudflare-exporter lablabs-cloudflare-exporter/cloudflare-exporter \
--set env[0].CF_API_EMAIL=<API_EMAIL> \
--set env[1].CF_API_KEY=<API_KEY>

We also provide a Helmfile in our repo to make deployments easier, you just need to add your credentials to make it work.

I’ve already explained how the exporter works and how you can get it running. As I mentioned before, we use Grafana to visualize our metrics from Prometheus. We’ve created a dashboard that takes the data from Prometheus and puts it into use.

The dashboard is divided into several rows, which group individual panels for easier navigation. It allows you to target individual zones for metrics visualization.

To make things even more beneficial for the operations team, you can use the gathered metrics to create alerts. These can be created either in Grafana directly or using Prometheus alert rules.

Furthermore, if you integrate Thanos or Cortex into your monitoring setup, you can store these metrics indefinitely.

We’d like to integrate even more analytics data into our exporters, eventually reaching every metric that Cloudflare’s GraphQL can provide. We plan on creating new metrics for firewall analytics, DoS analytics, and Network analytics soon.

Feel free to create a GitHub issue if you have any questions, problems, or suggestions. Any pull request is greatly appreciated.

Labyrinth Labs helps companies build, run, deploy and scale software and infrastructure by embracing the right technologies and principles.

Well let me explain..

Customer Success is a relatively new function that is becoming increasingly popular with XaaS businesses (XaaS stands for Anything as a Service).  With any XaaS product, it is no longer the case that you make a significant investment in a perpetual license and are left to figure out how to implement it, how to use it and what else it can do. XaaS businesses operate a subscription model whereby if the product is not actually solving your problem, you can just stop the subscription and move on. Businesses operating a subscription model need to ensure that there is continuous and even increasing value for their customers. This is what Customer Success teams are responsible for.

As Success Managers, we help customers make the most out of their contracted products and we operate on the assumption that if the products are helping customers solve problems, while delivering ROI, then there is a good motive to renew the subscription. Internally Customer Success performance should, in theory, be easy to measure because customers vote with their wallets. Compound that, as XaaS companies mature, the revenue from existing subscriptions exceeds revenue from new sales (explanation), and there is a good reason why you will meet many, many Customer Success Managers in the foreseeable future.

Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better internet and we do that partly by replacing hardware with similar capabilities in the cloud. We are no strangers to subscriptions and Customer Success.

Cloudflare Enterprise customers get allocated a named Customer Success Manager (CSM) to help with, amongst other things: on-boarding, project and resource management on the Cloudflare side, customer training, configuration recommendations, ongoing insights, sharing best practices, point of escalation and more. Going back to what the title is, it’s not easy to come up with a name for a jack of all trades.

Our CSM team is dispersed across multiple offices and time zones. It’s no coincidence that we happen to be physically located next to (literally, a few meters away from) our colleagues in the Solutions Engineering team and Customer Support team. From this perspective, we are quite privileged that we can access resources cross-functionally and pull them into customer meetings. It’s not unusual that we show up at a customer meeting with Jen Taylor, our Head of Product, or one of our C-level execs or even a founder! It’s good for the overall business relationship and good for our senior leaders to see and hear first hand what works and what doesn't.

Cloudflare’s engineering team release changes multiple times each day so there will always be new functionality that is relevant for our customers. While we do keep customers updated via our blog, regular Enterprise features webinars and the monthly Enterprise newsletter, wouldn’t it be good for someone at Cloudflare (say like a Customer Success Manager) to filter through all this information and provide customers with specific use cases for their specific needs? If you haven’t already, make sure that emails from @cloudflare.com addresses can reach your inbox as we tend to email you from time to time with tailored recommendations and invitations to regular Business Reviews.

And it doesn’t end there..

Your Customer Success Manager will become your advocate and will coordinate internally in an attempt to influence the road map. It may sound like I am talking about double agents here, but it’s true. It is important that we continue to innovate and also work towards delivering our most requested features and product requests. The more problems we can solve for our customers, the more useful our products become. Liaising with the Product team is something that we do very well at Cloudflare but given the broad product offering, we will sometimes have specific requests backlogged.

One of things we are working on improving is our ability to be closer to our customers. We want to see customers where it’s convenient for them and we want to have the opportunity to understand the specifics of different regions in the world. It does make a difference (by an order of magnitude) when we can sit down at the same table and work together towards our customers goals. Internally we’ve been able to map regions to CSMs, but it wasn’t until recently that we have rolled out a solution that scales.

Meetups, we found out, are a great medium for our customers to meet face to face with our team, within their regions and with minimum effort. While organised by the CSM team in collaboration with our Marketing team, it’s not just CSMs that make the trip to various different countries of the world. Product Directors, Product Managers, Engineers and Solutions Engineers typically attend as well as speak at these meet-ups. In addition, we also encourage customers to share use cases and tips. If you haven’t attended one yet, lookout for an invite as we do organise a few every month!

My name is Valentine, and like Cosmin, I am part of the CSM team in London! As a CSM, the most exciting part of my role is to meet our customers face to face, shake their hands, and actually meet the people that always sat at the other side of the screen. Meeting customers in person is not only exciting, but also vital to building a strong interpersonal relationship with your customers, getting to know them and their company’s goals better. Customer Meetups are not only a great setting to further foster these relationships, but also to help customers get more value from Cloudflare, because it is a great environment for customers to get to know more about Cloudflare too.

During a recent EMEA meetup, organised in the vibrant city of Berlin, two different customers presented their story with Cloudflare. One customer shared how their Cloudflare use-case changed focus from security to scalability and how this transformation was thanks to Cloudflare Logs’ integration with their preferred visualisation partner, Datadog.

The second customer presentation was more code oriented, and they did a deep dive into their use-case for Workers: how they migrated their front-end to the Edge with Workers. This helped other customers grasp the power of Workers when integrated within their business logic, especially because Workers is a product with so many endless opportunities. Sharing how they are using Workers helped make use-cases more concrete and helped attendees understand the true added-value. Both customer stories enjoyed an enthusiastic session of Q&A, where customers could ask questions to each other directly. As a CSM, it is exciting to see how customers with the same goals and pains can relate to and learn from each other. Meetups are a great environment to give customers the opportunity to meet each other too, and discover other best practices.

During the Berlin event, Alex Cruz Farmer, Product Manager for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, joined us. This was another occasion for customers to get more first hand information and knowledge on what happens behind the scenes from a technical perspective, and also a look into the WAF road map. During the networking session, customers could also reach out to Alex in person and get more details on topics they were particularly interested in. It is important for us, as CSMs, to make these PMs accessible and give customers the chance to give their feedback too.

So, in a flexible nutshell, this is how a Customer Meetup format usually looks: an exciting mix between customers sharing their Cloudflare stories, Cloudflare Product and Engineering team members doing demos or sharing what they are working on, followed by a networking session to make sure everyone has a chance to speak to everyone. And, in a successful Customer Meetup, the outcome hopefully is that relationships have flourished, customers have learned from each other and Cloudflare, that Cloudflare has learned from its customers, and that everyone had a good time.

So far, we have organised meetups in EMEA in locations ranging from the UK to Armenia, stopping along the way in places like Malta, Sweden and Russia. Our North America, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific teams have organised more than 11 meetups since the beginning of the year!

The CSM team are by no means professionals at organising events, but as the saying goes “Practice makes perfect”, and with each meetup we continuously iterate and learn from past obstacles to make the next one even better. That is why it really means a lot to us that you join us in our future events that will be coming up this year! We’d also like to invite you to present at our events, if you are keen to be a speaker one day. Also, regardless of where you are in the world, do let us know whether you’d be interested in hosting a Cloudflare Customer Meetup. We would be happy to hear your interest and collaborate with you!

We'd also love to see you at one of our upcoming meetups coming in Johannesburg or Paris.

Hope to meet you soon!Cloudflare Customer Success team

This is a guest post from Rodney Gibbs. Rodney is the CIO of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit media organization that covers public policy, politics, and government. He and his team recently supported major livestreamed events at South by Southwest (SXSW), a conference that attracts more than 70,000 music, arts and digital media aficionados.

A few days before the start of the SXSW, I got a call from Hugh Forrest, the head of interactive programming at the festival. The Texas Tribune has worked with SXSW organizers on previous events such as SXSW Edu. Our organization was also recently in the news for livestreaming the Texas state filibuster that lasted 11 hours, gaining more than 200,000 concurrent viewers from 187 countries around the world.

Hugh was looking for help with a couple of events that were sure to be hugely popular - livestreamed interviews of two major speakers - Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks and has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012. Edward Snowden is the NSA contractor who released classified files detailing the US spy agency’s internet-tapping programs around the world. Hugh wanted to work with a news organization to livestream the SXSW interviews so he turned to The Texas Tribune.

On Thursday before the festival, we put together a plan to help us prepare for a super high-level of traffic and being on an international stage. We assembled a team, including our director of technology, Amanda Krauss, who listed all the things we’d need to do to make sure our website was ready to handle a crush of web visitors. More importantly, we wanted to tighten up security and make it difficult for any malicious actors to mess with us.

Harper Reed is an advisor to our organization. In a past life, he was the CTO for Obama for America, managing the website for Obama 2012. We asked him to look over our list and see if he would add anything. He made two suggestions - one of which was adding CloudFlare. It was Friday night at 4pm - about 16 hours before the Assange interview, when I reached out to CloudFlare’s CEO Matthew Prince via LinkedIn. We got a call back soon thereafter and our team spent the rest of the night setting up and testing CloudFlare on our website.

Our hard work paid off - the Assange livestream went off smoothly.

We had a lot of loose ends on our to-do list in terms of security, scaling, and elasticity - for us it was good to have these livestreamed interviews as a forcing function. But we were lucky - we had Harper who had learned the hard way and generously shared what he learned so that it went smoothly for us.

It seems like the going rule of thumb nowadays is ‘Don’t assume you’re not going to get hacked, just assume you need to figure out what you’re going to do about it.’ The hardest thing is to learn something under pressure. We got our security measures set up pretty quickly but if I could offer advice I would suggest doing the following:

1. Implement 2-factor authentication for your third party apps

2. Enforce strong passwords for your CMS and apps users, making sure people don’t use the same password elsewhere

3. Close down ports you don’t need - starting, for example, by closing down everything but ports 80 and 443

4. If you're worried you'll come under attack, put up a static site as your main site, disconnecting it from any back-end databases. A hacked database is irrelevant if your static site is still up.

Finally, we host our website on Amazon’s S3 but thought it would be good to put CloudFlare in front of it to defend against DDoS or other possible web threats and also speed up any content that wasn’t on Amazon. If you implement CloudFlare, the other piece of advice I’d offer is make sure you don’t mistakenly reveal your origin IPs externally (or ‘leak’ them).

On the day of the Snowden interview, The Texas Tribune saw a 10X spike in traffic. Typically 90% of our traffic is Texas, with the rest coming from New York, Chicago, and Washington DC. This time more than 80% of our visitors were new to the site, hailing from over 200 countries. Visitors from the Netherlands totalled more than half of what we saw from the US and the top country list also included Belgium and Mexico in addition to your usual Western European suspects. It felt good to be able to serve international traffic.

We also got a few emails thanking us. One from Brazil said, ‘I caught the end of the telecast and am just so impressed with what you've done and the technology that permitted me to see it! Thank you is not enough to say for your organization!’ That’s the kind of thanks that makes working late nights worthwhile.

We had an incredibly smooth experience, no downtime, no lagging, no security problems - it all went super smoothly. A lot of folks pitched in to make these events happen. I tweeted out my thanks and it bears repeating here.

Big thx to @harper @maycotte @clockwerks @CloudFlare @Chartbeat & @livestream for help w/ @texastribune's #Snowden #SXSW stream. — Rodney Gibbs (@rgibbs) March 10, 2014

I hope you can learn from our experiences and your next major event goes as smoothly as ours did.

As a Technical Support Engineer I get to work with many different members of the CloudFlare family and with customers from all around the world. Each day is very different to the next, and of course, some days stand out more than others.

Recently, I spent a bit of time working with a customer on an issue that was causing severe performance degradation on their website. The initial inquiry described a website that was yet to be publicised so it wasn’t seeing very much traffic. However, pages on the site were taking almost a minute to load. Throughout the day I worked with both the customer and other members of the support team to eliminate all the possible causes of the performance degradation. The main areas we looked at were:

• Did the customer’s server run out of resources?

• Was there anything preventing assets from being cached?

• Had the ISP of the customer caused traffic to be routed strangely?

• Were there any parts of the site that were noticeably slower than others?

• Did performance change when browsing the customer’s server directly?

After eliminating each of those points, it was unclear to us what was causing the issue. At this point we decided to make some configuration changes within the customer’s CloudFlare account. The main thing we did was to set up a few Page Rules to force everything under a certain URL pattern to be cached. The motivation for doing this was to ensure the site was fast for visitors while we continued to work on the performance issue behind the scenes. Another feature enabled for this CloudFlare Business customer was Railgun, to improve performance on any pages that we couldn’t set a Cache Everything page rule on.

After a careful examination of exactly what was running on the customer’s server we managed to find what was causing the issues — it was an installation of a caching programme on the origin that was taking up too much CPU, causing the web server to have to wait a long time before it could respond to any incoming requests. Upon disabling the programme the CPU load on the server dropped dramatically, this hugely improved performance.

By the end of the day the issue was solved and the customer had some extra CloudFlare features enabled to fully optimise the performance of their website — a great day working with a customer.

About Marty

Though he’d love to be at a Formula 1 race track any day of the week, we have convinced Marty to hang out in our UK office and help our customers. Previously a developer, Marty came to CloudFlare in the most awesome of ways: he was a customer. He’s now excited to be behind the scenes making the CloudFlare experience better for everyone. On his off days, he’ll be traveling between Formula 1 race tracks throughout the world.

The London Support Team (Marty is on the far left)

Do you have the enthusiasm to work with a technically motivated team? Do you enjoy working with a diverse global customer base? Are you somebody who uses their intuition to solve problems? CloudFlare is hiring Technical Support Engineers in London and San Francisco.

Forecasters have estimated that online holiday shopping will account for almost 25 percent of total ecommerce sales in 2012. That's more than $54 Billion dollars in online transactions. With so much shopping happening online, we thought we'd talk to one of our ecommerce customers to hear what they do to prepare their site for the busiest time of the year.

Luxury Link curates exclusive travel experiences with luxury properties around the world at insider prices. Chris Holland is the Director of Technology at Luxury Link, and has more than 16 years of web development experience. I recently spoke with Chris to learn more about Luxury Link, what he has seen over the years in the ecommerce industry, and what it's like to run an ecommerce site when the holidays hit.

Since 1997, luxurylink.com has evolved from an exclusive e-mail list to exclusive online listings. Luxury Link has pioneered the web-based auction model for Luxury Travel. Our audience is extremely savvy, discerning and demanding of the greatest possible value for the most outstanding luxury vacation experiences.

While we used to have the niche to ourselves, the online travel landscape is competitive and so we are constantly working to optimize our website to make sure our visitors get the most out of the experience. Our web property experience includes everything from design to merchandising to site performance to SEO and the conversion funnel, as well as offering valuable insights to travelers while accommodating innovative marketing and product strategies. We, in the Tech Team, have our work cut out for ourselves catering to many business functions.

We've had to evolve beyond merely "selling online." It's no longersufficient to put up a page clamoring "Here are 12 a mazing vacations this week." We've seen travelers increasingly seeking inspiration and guidance. Finding the right vacation is a personalized and, at times, challenging process as many variables need to be juggled. While we've dramatically improved search and categorization on our site, we're just getting started. Solving these problems is less about using a specific search technology like Lucene, SphinX, SLI Systems, or Endeca and more about information architecture and accommodating a critical factor: Human curation. Everything you see on our site is an ever-evolving blend of human and machine curation. While search engines will seek out what you want, we have the added responsibility of helping visitors shape their traveling desires.

These core fundamentals really matter: performance, SEO, business intelligence, merchandising, and seasonal relevance.

For site performance, one of the tools we use is CloudFlare. To audit and monitor site speed, we use a blend of inexpensive resources such as webpagetest.org,Google PageSpeed Insights, and WatchMouse(now Nimsoft Cloud Monitor). I'll defer to your local expert to cover SEO.

We leverage Google Analytics and in-house-built event frameworks and data warehousing for various aspects of business intelligence. I'm a big fan of Tableau Software to crunch data.For any site, and especially commerce sites, analyzing your marketing channels and respective conversion rates can uncover valuable insights: A/B testing is a very important part of this process. We've found PHP Scenario very helpful and we've integrated it into our A/B testing platform.

You might also consider giving your customers a voice by launching a community around your brand. While we've had a community on our site for some time, participation in it had died down. In 2012 we completely revamped it into "The Luxury Lounge" -- This initiative has brought about renewed interest from our loyal members in sharing their travel experiences. It's a veritable trove of great travel insights. It is positive for SEO, as well.

Online commerce has had to evolve beyond just listing and selling products, as competition and margins have become fierce. Consumers seek insights and guidance. Commerce sites featuring fresh, relevant and timely content in the form of editorial and consumer insights, tend to do better than sites that don't. In recognition of this, Google's algorithm updates have shaken things up. Incumbent sites that once merely listed products are finding themselves displaced by sites offering relevant content about those products. SEO is an exciting world where quality content is king, and this has had an impact on every commerce site I've worked on.

It is typically all about Q1 for the travel industry. We expect a 50% jump in traffic in January over November. While we do have plenty of capacity, CloudFlare's "always-on" feature is a nice safety net.

We ensure our zabbix monitors are well-tuned, stick to best practices when deploying new code, don't stray away from our phones at nights, and generally do everything we can to ensure the site is running fast.

The top five pages and locations people are looking at include:

• Ski and Snow Destinations

• Caribbean

• Cabo San Lucas

• London

• BaliGuided Tours

Our server origin is in downtown Los Angeles. We have seen a big speed difference in the average time it takes to download a dynamic web page weighing 23,000 bytes from Texas:

Without CloudFlare: 569 milliseconds
With CloudFlare: 332 milliseconds

This is for dynamic content. In other words, for this type of request, CloudFlare has to fetch the dynamic content from our system, and then pass it along to the user, every time. Going through CloudFlare for dynamic content delivery is 42 percent faster.

Overall, I believe CloudFlare is the best thing to happen to the Web in recent memory, and by extension, the Internet at large. CloudFlare's infrastructure is staggering and the architecture and pace of innovation are simply impressive. CloudFlare's offerings have an incredibly positive impact on site owners and web visitors.

We get a lot of questions from our customers about CloudFlare and how we impact SEO. So when SEO.com signed up for CloudFlare, I thought it would be a great opportunity to talk to an expert to get the scoop on all things SEO. I was fortunate enough to connect with Derek Perkins, Vice President of Technology at SEO.com. With more than 12 years of industry experience, Derek provided his insight on SEO in general, debunked some of the myths out there, and gave us his take on what really works, and what doesn't, when it comes to SEO and your site.

DP - Step one - use WordPress and WordPress SEO. For most website owners, a Content Management System is key. The WordPress platform would be my first choice, you don't have to deal with structure of a Wordpress site to make sure it's easily searchable and findable. WordPress ranks high, especially if you activate WordPress SEO by Yoast. A combination of those two alone put you a long way ahead of where smaller business are. Correct structure is a good thing.

Step two - Focus on great content. Sporadic posting is never going to yield a tangible output. The more Google changes their algorithms, the more likely you will get ranked lower if you're not posting often. Just posting frequently however isn't enough. Content has always risen to the top of rankings, and as search engines mature, they are continuing to increase the signal to noise ratio. Posting great content regularly is the key to SEO success.

Step three - find good website hosting that will be elastic. Great content that gets picked up on TechCrunch, Digg, Reddit - any viral site - is going to see heavy spikes in traffic. If you're on a cheap hosting plan you often won't be able to scale to meet demands.

Actually, one of the first things I do is recommend CloudFlare. I love the CDN and scalability, it takes load off of the server so you don' have to worry so much about load spikes.

DP - A big misperception about SEO is the idea that you have to somehow change your writing or write things that are for search engines instead of humans. That's not the case. A lot of people also say you have to have unnaturally high keyword density and that's the only way you're going to rank. That's not good, it's harmful. Google sees that as if you're writing it specifically for SEO. Search engines try to read content as if they were human. If the content doesn't flow well or read well for a human, chances are it's not going to read well for a search engine or spider.

SEO is all about having good content. Write content you and others would like to read. It is more likely be shared socially, bringing more people to your site, and more people will link back to your site, growing your online presence.

When people think of SEO they tend to focus on the 10 percent that's the little tweaks that SEO companies can do for you, whereas the bulk of the value comes from writing good content.

DP - There are a number of places on the web that have good SEO forums. We have a link on our own site,www.SEO.com/forums, that links to a number of the best forums out there. Another great resource is SEOmoz, it's a great place for website owners to start.

DP - Number one thing that people don't do - they don't have any sort of targets. Content is king, but a lot of it is knowing what specificcontent is going to be most valuable to them. You can write about two different things that are both interesting, exciting and relevant to your audience, but one is relevant to maybe 10 searches a month, whereas one is relevant to 10,000 searches a month. Having an idea of what pages or blog posts or keywords you're targeting with each will help you tailor the content.

DP - Picking the wrong page titles and/or having a malformed HTML structure. There's a lot of SEO weight on title and header tags, you need to have your page title similar to whatever is in your H1 tag. A lot of site owners out there don't have header tags or have them set-up correctly. Even if they have a good title, the title might not be in the HTML header tag. The title and headers help both search engines and more importantly humans identify the focus of the page.

DP - I think SEO has a bit of a stigma because of old tactics that people used to use. You used to be able to immediately rank for SEO by using tricks like white text on a white background and various other tactics to gain the system. Even just recently Google has released things like Penguin, making it harder and harder to game the system. It changes how SEO agencies function, shifting the focus from link building to strategic content driven approaches. That has driven a proliferation of socially shareable content like infographics.

DP - Personally, I occasionally use Bing, but I tend to go back to Google. I took the test myself and Bing won 3 to 2, but I felt like the stripped down result pages weren't a perfect test.

DP - Bing has been gaining ground, Yahoo!'s results are powered by Microsoft, so Bing and Yahoo! will both show same results. The big two are definitely Google and Bing. You can't ignore Bing when you're tracking rankings, but they are definitely playing second fiddle to Google at this point.

For a long time Google has provided the best search rankings. Whether or not Bing has closed the gap on search, they have an uphill battle. People are used to Google, it's becoming part of the English language. I doubt that anyone outside of Microsoft headquarters has ever said "I don't know the answer, let me go Bing it."

I've been using CloudFlare for over a year now. I had a personal website calledsoccerreviews.com. I built it up to have significant traffic and I was really having server load issues, in addition to having been hacked twice. Because of that, security and scalability was very important to me.

I tried CloudFlare on that site and I now have it on 30 other sites. I have yet to have any of those sites compromised, which has been fantastic.

Once I joined SEO.com, I put us on CloudFlare. One feature I really like about CloudFlare is Rocket Loader. It combines all my javascript files and speeds them up, and they aren't all being downloaded separately, decreasing download time.

As for the impact to SEO, bounce rate plays a very important role in how Google does their rankings - they see that as a human factor in SEO. If someone immediately jumps back to Google, it's obviously not a good human source. A fast site that's always online is sure to help your rankings with lower bounce rates, and having CloudFlare helps to make this possible.

The San Francisco MarathonThe San Francisco Marathon is a popular race. With 24,000 runners competing in five events, the San Francisco Marathon has runners of all ages, from all over the globe. The website is used for registration, to organize runners during the actual event weekend and to track each runners race time.

"I really love how simple it was to set up and use. CloudFlare is an easy to use CDN service with offerings at all levels," said said Laura Baalman, an independent IT consultant to the San Francisco Marathon website. "I would recommend anyone with a website, especially those that get big changes in traffic, to give it a try."

Read full case study here.

StorifyStorify helps its users tell stories by curating social media. Storify sees huge spikes of traffic during major events around the world, like Hurricane Sandy or the U.S. presidential election.

"Thanks to services like CloudFlare, we can scale Storify to more than 24 million story views per month with only 3 engineers," said Xavier Damman, co-founder and CEO of Storify.

During Hurricane Sandy, CloudFlare saved Storify more than 75 million requests and over 470 GB of bandwidth.

"Having CloudFlare save these requests has enabled us to stay online and keep up with the surges in traffic due to significant news sharing during Hurricane Sandy," said Xavier.

Read full blog post here.

Runa TeaRuna produces guayusa tea sourced from the Ecuadorian Amazon. Guayusa balances as much caffeine as one cup of coffee with twice the antioxidants of green tea creating. The drink has gained popularity around the world, including among the CloudFlare team. It is always well-stocked in our kitchen.

"We love CloudFlare and recommend it to anyone looking for amazingresults," said Anna Premo Director of Marketing at Runa.

seo.comSeo.com is an experienced search marketing firm dedicated to making websites more visible online and profitable.

"I've been using CloudFlare for over a year now. I had a personal website which began to see significant traffic and I was really having server load issues. In addition, the site had been hacked twice. Because of that, security and scalability was important to me," said Derek Perkins, VP of Technology at SEO.com. "I tried CloudFlare on that website and I now have it on 30 other sites, including seo.com. I have yet to have any of those sites compromised, which has been fantastic."

ZopimZopim is an award winning, cloud based live chat platform that makes it easy for businesses to deliver fast customer service online. Businesses who sign up with Zopim are fanatics when it comes to delivering customer wow. More than 50,000 businesses use Zopim Live Chat to chat with their online customers everyday. Zopim is based in Singapore.

"Thanks to CloudFlare's CDN, our chat widget began loading extremely fast no matter where it was being loaded from," said Qing. "By caching and serving the static images on our widget, CloudFlare accelerated the byte load and reduced the widget loading time by at least 50%. Even our customers could feel the significant improvement in speed."

Read full case study here.

Ekaterina DokuchaevaEkaterina Dokuchaeva is a talented photographer from Russia with her own unique style and creativity. Despite the fact that Ekaterina is just 21 years old, she has already done exquisite art creations and continues to work hard in the photo-industry.

"There's an introduction song playing on the backround of the landing page. This song made page load speed very slow and visitors constantly complained that the site was not fast enough," said Dokuchaev Konstantin, who manages the site. "Once I enabled CloudFlare's CDN and compression features to our website, the page load time immediately reduced to three seconds in all browsers. It was great solution of our problem. I wasn't expecting such a noticable change!"

Do you have a story you'd like to share about CloudFlare? I'd like to hear it and feature you on our blog! testimonials@cloudflare.com

CloudFlare is based in San Francisco, California, USA but we serve a global audience. Every minute of every day we send and receive traffic from nearly all of the world's networks. Beyond traffic to our service, our customers also come from around the world. To better understand where our customers come from, Algin Martin on our customer support team pulled data from a day of logins to CloudFlare.com in order to produce the map at the top of this post.

The results show CloudFlare's customers literally circle the globe, with a relatively even distribution between the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Turns out that making sure your website is fast and safe is a universal problem that resonates regardless of where you are in the world.

None of this surprised Jenn on our team who, in just the last 6 weeks, sent t-shirts to CloudFlare customers in 67 different countries. And she's sending out more every day. Thanks to everyone around the world who have helped make CloudFlare a global community. We're all working together to build a better Internet.

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.

We are excited to announce three winners for the WordCamp Las Vegas ticket giveaway. The lucky winners are:

Chirag Patel, Michael Scott and Ben Hebert!

Congratulations winners and have a great time at WordCamp Las Vegas. Be sure to check-out CloudFlare's own Matthew Prince, as he will be speaking at and attending the conference himself.

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway. We will be sending each of you a CloudFlare t-shirt. Look for an email from us in the near future.

Last week CloudFlare received a call from the team at The Pumpkin Lady. They are currently preparing for their busiest week of the year and were looking to CloudFlare to help with their increase in traffic.As you may tell, pumpkinlady.com is a website dedicated to pumpkin carving. A talented woman has created a thriving business by offering pumpkin carving patterns to people all over the world. This online business has a global audience, attracting its largest audience from Europe.

Each year, as households look for carving inspiration, The Pumpkin Lady has to handle a large increase in traffic. October is their busiest month, typically seeing 15 times more traffic compared to the rest of the year.This year, The Pumpkin Lady started to use CloudFlare. They heard about us through our partnership with WP Total Cache. Here's what happened, in their own words, after they installed CloudFlare.

From pumpkinlady.com:I've been ecstatic over great purchases before...you know, the ones that you run out and tell all your friends about, the ones that make your day a little brighter...When I signed up with CloudFlare, however, it was more of a Quad Vente White Mocha caffeine buzz combined with Rocks You Like a Hurricane blaring to the point of speaker distortion all the while praying that there are no police around because I can't keep my foot of the gas" type of experience!Our website has been around for 13 years now and traffic has been steadily growing since year one. Along with growth, however, come the pains of greater bandwidth and CPU usage. Last year we had to make two server moves during the peak of our season to accommodate the increase in resource consumption. All in all we ended up with a drastic increase in server expenses just for September and October, not to mention the lost sales during the down time. Our business is seasonal, so that means we only have to deal with this level of traffic and resource usage for a couple of months a year. In addition to the increased server costs, we also had to invest hours of manpower to move the site back to a shared hosting environment once the traffic died down.

I was determined to set up our infrastructure this year in a way that would prevent us from having to move from the shared hosting environment. Fortunately, I came across CloudFlare. In the month of October alone, CloudFlare has saved us about 1.54 Terabytes...not Gigabytes...Terabytes! The bandwidth alone was enough to blow my mind, but I was floored when I saw the amount of requests that were saved. Out of 140,851,468 requests in the past 30 days, CloudFlare saved us 136,604,571 requests.In short, CloudFlare has provided us with the resource savings that we needed to stay in a shared hosting environment. CloudFlare is truly one of the best investments we have ever made...anyone who has not taken advantage of this company's great service is definitely missing out.

Jack Berberette ~ Vice-President ~ The Pumpkin Lady, Inc._I'm the Pumpkin Lady's hubby ~ She's the artist, I just handle the techie stuff.The Pumpkin Lady is a Pro customer which costs $20 per month. The service has saved them hundreds of dollars during this busy time. The layer of security and expanded capacity let's their team focus on delivering an awesome experience to their customers.With a week until All Hallow's Eve, if you are looking for pumpkin carving inspiration, I encourage you to check out The Pumpkin Lady. It will be online throughout the holiday!_

](https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/snap-engage)

The newest CloudFlare App helps you talk with your customers. SnapEngage is live chatfor your website, which helps you "turn visitors into customers and, ultimately, friends." Their words, and well said. SnapEngage is a friendly, effective service, useful both for site owners and for customers.

For site owners, the best feature might be chatting straight from your IM (Skype or Google Talk): no new software to learn or install.

Or maybe it's the ability to use your mobile device to chat with customers. Or maybe co-browsing, so you can see what your customers need help with. See the full list of features, including the list of 26 supported languages, and decide for yourself. (Did we mention proactive chat? Again, hard to choose a favorite feature.)

Via CloudFlare Apps, SnapEngage turns on with a simple toggle. Immediately, a SnapEngage account is created for you, where you can link your IM client. Note: until you do link your clients, customers may still email you via SnapEngage. Also, a Help tab is inserted on your site on the lower right side. This can be moved and customized with your SnapEngage account.

Your SnapEngage account starts with a free 15-day trial, with all Premium services enabled. Once the trial has expired, your account will be limited to one chat per day. At any time, purchase the service level you need in the CloudFlare dashboard.

Sign up for your SnapEngage free trial now.

This week marked the introduction of CloudFlare Apps.

CloudFlare now offers VigLink, Apture Highlights, and Google Analytics in the Apps dashboard. All three services are directly available to CloudFlare customers with one-click simple integration.

What our customers are saying about the Apps launch:

Joe S. - DeadliestWhispe @Cloudflare thanks for@CloudflareApps, installing@apture was ridiculously simple! works like a charm!!

Jose S. - josers18 Congrats to@Cloudflare and@VigLink for releasing!

Doug J. - "I can't wait until Pingdom, and Google Webmaster Tools are released!!!"

James T. - "Look forward to other apps being released :)"

CloudFlare will be releasing five more Apps next week, starting onMonday, June 6th (GMT). Stay tuned!

CloudFlare is excited to introduce App #2: Apture Highlights, which is now available in CloudFlare Apps. Apture automatically adds contextual search to your website, which means that your visitors stay more engaged with your content since they have the tools to search and share without leaving your page. Apture gives your readers the power to search the web for rich content from Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Flickr, YouTube and others all through your site. The result is that on average, Apture increases user engagement by 2 to 3 times.

Apture is a free App available through CloudFlare's easy integration.

By simply selecting "ON", Apture will automatically integrate on the pages of your site.

Visit the Apture page [link removed] now to keep your users engaged on your site!

Excited for what's coming next? Stay tuned for tomorrow's app: analytics solutions made even easier by CloudFlare.

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5576915675/ "Metallica Logo by dbillian, on Flickr")

While I may be dating myself in this post, I've been a fan of Metallica since 1986. Like many other teenagers listening to music during my youth, I was largely listening to a lot of cheesy "hair bands" during High School (ummm...1980's) and didn't really appreciate the thrash metal bands that were around.

Then Metallica came along and blew my mind; their virtuosity, heavy (yet melodic) sound, and interesting timeshifts from their rhythm section opened me to a whole new world of rock music that changed what rock music would become. Other than perhaps the mighty Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I can think of no other heavy metal band that influenced so many of the bands of the past thirty years or so.

The first time I saw Metallica live was on their 'And Justice for All' tour, playing with the band Queensryche at the Cow Palace in 1988. Metallica and Queensryche were my two favorite bands, so it was a dream come true, and I even had the fortune of going backstage after the show. Rich and famous? Yes. Approachable and cool? Totally. It was definitely a highlight of my teenage years to meet the band members I had idolized.

The last time I saw Metallica was at a private show at the Fillmore in San Francisco, fifteen years later in 2003. While time is generally not kind to rock bands, Metallica was still as tight a band as they were when I first saw them live fifteen years earlier and rocked the house like few bands can.

Fast forward to 2011...

A few weeks ago, Metallica signed up for the CloudFlare service. I reached out to the network admin to find out why Metallica decided to use CloudFlare, and the response is below:

As Metallica's technical consultants and an existing user of CloudFlare, we didn't hesitate to recommend your service to not only add a layer of security to the Metallica website and message boards but also to help reduce the load on their servers. In addition, Metallica's worldwide fan base benefits from the distributed content to speed up load times in countries where their site would normally take longer to load. Once these benefits were explained to Metallica's web management, the decision was easy.

CloudFlare is super excited to have Metallica join us, and our goal is to make all of Metallica's fans happy by making the Metallica site as fast as Metallica's music.

Today is Groundhog Day: the day on which a groundhog (named Phil) crawls out of his hole in Punxsutawney, PA and either sees his shadow, meaning we're in for six more weeks of winter, or does not, in which case it will be an early spring. Phil's official keeper is the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club. As you'd expect, the Club has a website: www.groundhog.org.

The site gets a consistent stream of visitors during the year, but every February 2 it gets slammed.

This year, the 125th Anniversary of the Groundhog Day tradition, the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club turned to CloudFlare's free service to help keep its site online during their spike in traffic. To get a sense of the volume, below is the Analytics page for the site which shows over 2.2 million page views over the last 24 hours, spiking at nearly 300,000 per hour this morning.

We're happy to report that CloudFlare did not disappoint Phil or his loyal following. In spite of the Club's backend server crashing at one point, CloudFlare's Always Online feature kept the site online throughout the day and helped substantially decrease the server load. As Glenn Kelly, who helps administer the groundhog.org site just wrote us:

Yesterday afternoon our server experienced an outage due to increased traffic. If CloudFlare were not in place, the entire website would have been offline.

CloudFlare even kept the contents of the site available when the Club took it down for scheduled maintenance late last night. In the end, even with an enormous flood of traffic, according to Glenn there was "zero downtime." And, all the while, CloudFlare's global network helped make the site about 40% faster for visitors worldwide.

Best of all, since Phil did not see his shadow, it looks like it will be an early Spring. The entire team of CloudFlare is proud to have been a little part of bringing that news to the world.