Over the weekend, I happened by a pumpkin carving contest in Monterey. One of the winning pumpkins was a low-relief scene of a pirate ship. The hull was created by carving the pumpkin in the traditional way. To make the sails, some of the pumpkin skin was cut away giving them a translucent effect. Looking at this, I thought to myself, “Hey, that would be really cool do with the CloudFlare logo.” So I did.

As CloudFlare’s legal counsel, I spend a good deal of my time protecting the trademarks. Since our launch in 2010, the CloudFlare brand has come to stand for something more than just our products and services. The CloudFlare brand is an important symbol of our company’s efforts to build a better Internet. That mission is why I decided to carve my jack-o’-lantern with the CloudFlare logo.

CloudFlare has protected many websites from threats and specters. A quick glance at some of our customers reveals that we have protected 215 websites with the word Halloween from spooky, spooky vampires, trolls, and other demons. We’ve also had 49 ‘scary’ websites, 15 goblins, 10 ghouls, 577 ghosts, 18 spooky, 49 scary, 25 haunted, and 2 trick or treat, but no jack-o’-lanterns.

If you’re the kind of person who can take pride in not just warding off bad spirits but also addressing the serious challenges of building a better Internet, join our team. CloudFlare is hiring.

Wishing you a safe and happy halloween!

With Halloween around the corner, I caught up with one of our customers, the husband and wife team behind Pumpkinlady.com. If you haven't been to their website, it offers a range of pumpkin carving stencils and accessories for the holiday season. The website has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years. Lisa Berberette (aka, The Pumpkin Lady) has been featured on Good Morning America and the Home Shopping Network, not to mention she's carved pumpkins for Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. I sat down with Jack Berberette (aka, The Pumpkin Hubby) to talk about their business and what it's like to run a seasonal website.

CF: How long have you been running the website pumpkinlady.com?JB: This is our 15th season! In 1998 we noticed that there really weren't a lot downloadable carving patterns on the web, so Lisa created a bunch of patterns and I designed the site as a place for people to grab some cool freebies. We had no idea that the site would take off the way it did.

CF: What are some of the perks of running a seasonal website? What are some of the challenges?JB: Running a seasonal site is cool in that it's easy to focus on a particular niche and we can relax a bit outside of the busy season. The downside is that we only have a three month income window. We're in the process now of working on a non-seasonal specific line of artwork that will hopefully fill in the nine month gap.

CF: Is there anything you do to prepare your website for the busy holiday season?JB: Over the years, more and more pumpkin carving sites have popped up. Now competition is a good thing, but it does present search engine ranking challenges (this past year even more so with Google's algorithm change). So, in March I started researching Google "ranking rules" and how we fit in compared to our competitors....from there I started making measured tweaks to optimize SEO.

Aside from search engine ranking, running a high volume, seasonal Wordpress site has presented some interesting challenges. I am constantly looking for ways to reduce CPU usage, database calls and bandwidth. From custom code tweaks in the e-commerce backend, optimizing caching to CDN, there is quite a bit to prepare for each year. But I'm a nerd and like that sort of thing.

CF: What advice would you give to other small businesses running a seasonal site?JB: Content generation for a seasonal site is easy, creating a great visitor experience is the challenge. Seasonal sites, by their very nature, are highly competitive. "Big Box" sites have huge budgets to hone in on that market. So, to set yourself apart, make sure that your visitors feel that they are the single most important thing that has ever happened to your business. It doesn't matter if they don't purchase anything, only spend a buck or place a huge order...the customer wants to know that you care about them and their experience they had on your site. If you can convey this type of conviction, you will definitely have an edge over the world of auto-responders and canned replies.

CF: Any tips or tricks you'd like to share on using CloudFlare?JB: Yes...don't ever stop using it, and if you aren't using CloudFlare, start right now! As far as tips go, I pretty much use the defaultsettings as I have found that these work best with our site and its plugins. I do recommend activating the Google Analytics settings.

In his own words...Without a doubt, the single most significant performance and security enhancement our site has ever experienced has been the incredible impact CloudFlare has made. In just the past 30 days, CloudFlare has saved our site from over 21 million requests and over 200GB of bandwidth. Knowing that CloudFlare has my back with great support, resource savings and enhanced site security makes my job as a site owner so much easier. If you aren't using this incredible service, then you are missing out on something great.

~ Jack Berberette (www.pumpkinlady.com)

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!_