There are over 50 languages spoken at Cloudflare, as we have natives from many countries on our team, with different backgrounds, religions, gender and cultures. And it is this diversity that makes us a great team.

A few days ago I asked one of my colleagues how he would say "Happy Holidays!" in Arabic. When I heard him say it, I instantly got the idea of recording a video in as many languages as possible of our colleagues wishing all of you, our readers and customers, a happy winter season.

It only took one internal message for people to start responding and sending their videos to me. Some did it themselves, others flocked in a meeting room and helped each other record their greeting. It took a few days and some video editing to put together an informal video that was entirely done by the team, to wish you all the best as we close this year and decade.

So here it is: Happy Holidays from all of us at Cloudflare!

Let us know if you speak any of the languages in the video. Or maybe you can tell us how you greet each other, at this time of the year, in your native language.

We're withholding answers until the start of the new year, to give you a chance to solve them without spoilers. Before we reveal the answers; if you manage to solve them, we'll be giving the first 5 people to get the answers right some Cloudflare swag. Fill out your answers and details using this form so we know where to send it.

Have fun!

UPDATE: This quiz is now closed. Thank you to everyone who's played. We have received many responses, 15 of which got all the answers right; we will shortly be sending out some swag to those who got the answers right.

NOTE: Hints, now followed with solutions, are below the questions, avoid scrolling too far if you want to avoid any spoilers.

Client says hello, as follows:

00000c07ac01784f437dbfc70800450000f2560140004006db58ac1020c843c7f80cd1f701bbc8b2af3449b598758018102a72a700000101080a675bce16787abd8716030100b9010000b503035c1ea569d5f64df3d8630de8bdddd1152e75f528ae577d2436949ce8deb7108600004400ffc02cc02bc024c023c00ac009c008c030c02fc028c027c014c013c012009f009e006b0067003900330016009d009c003d003c0035002f000a00af00ae008d008c008b010000480000000b000900000663666c2e7265000a00080006001700180019000b00020100000d0012001004010201050106010403020305030603000500050100000000001200000017000052305655494338795157524c656d6443436c5246574651675430346754456c4f52564d674e434242546b51674e513d3d

[Raw puzzle without text wrap]

A user has an authenticator device to generate one time passwords for logins to their banking website. The implementation contains a fatal flaw.

At the following times, the following codes are generated (all in GMT/UTC):

• Friday, 21 December 2018 16:29:28 - 084342

• Saturday, 22 December 2018 13:11:53 - 411907

• Tuesday, 25 December 2018 12:15:03 - 617041

What code will be generated at precisely midnight of the 1st of January 2019?

At Cloudflare, we just setup RPKI: we signed a few hundred prefixes in order to reduce route leaks. But some of the prefixes hide a secret message. Find the ROAs that look different, decode the word!

This challenge has 3 hints, as follows:

• Challenge is based on a network capture

• https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-sni/

• What's weird about the Frame?

The Time-Based One-Time Password Algorithm is described in RFC 6238, which was based of RFC4226 (providing an algorithm for HOTP). The TOTP algorithm requires input of two important parameters, the time and a shared secret - could one be missing?

The implementation used to generate the TOTP codes for the challenge uses SHA-1 as a digest algorithm.

Note: This challenge will no longer be valid after mid-January 2019.

This challenge has 4 hints, as follows:

• Hint #0: Four or six? Probably six.

• Hint #1: If only there was a way of listing only our IPs!

• Hint #2: What is the only part of the ROA where we can hide information into

• Hint #3: Subtract the reserve, the char will show itself

If you prefer video form, someone has created a YouTube video of the how to solve the problems, else the written solutions are below:

The string was (mostly) a capture from Wireshark of a Client Hello frame in TLS 1.2 handshake; as such, it reveals the Server Name where the connection is intended to go; in this case cfl.re.

There is a string suffixed to this hex stream which shouldn't be there; it's a base64 encoded string 




R0VUIC8yQWRLemdCClRFWFQgT04gTElORVMgNCBBTkQgNQ==. Decoding this string reveals:

GET /2AdKzgBTEXT ON LINES 4 AND 5

Accordingly; https://cfl.re/2AdKzgB redirects to https://www.cloudflare.com/robots.txt; on lines 4 and 5 is the phrase: "Dear robot be nice".

The GET request would obviously ordinarily not be appended to the Client Hello like this; however SNI information would be. You can find more about the work Cloudflare is doing to encrypt such information, so attackers cannot see which site you're visiting, in the following post: Encrypting SNI: Fixing One of the Core Internet Bugs

For this part, I'm going to use the pyotp library to demonstrate how the challenge is set-up:

>>> import pyotp>>> totp = pyotp.TOTP('')>>> print totp.at(1545409768)084342>>> print totp.at(1545484313)411907>>> print totp.at(1545740103)617041

Note that the argument to the TOTP function is set to an empty string, this means that there is no secret in place; and the one time passwords are generated solely from a hash of the time. Accordingly, a TOTP with the timestamp generated at midnight on New Year is 301554.

Whilst this may seem like a somewhat incredulous position for a developer to end up in - searching GitHub, I was even able to find implementations that used the default secret (base32secret3232) for all users wanting to authenticate to a website. This means that any other user's One Time Password is valid for any other account, and the secret could likely be breached fairly easily (as it isn't randomly generated).

Cloudflare can only generate ROAs based on their prefixes. The IPv6 prefixes are listed here: https://cloudflare.com/ips-v6.

Using any RPKI validated prefix list (https://rpki.cloudflare.com/rpki.json, or using the GUI of the RIPE’s RPKI Validator), test out our IPv6 prefixes. Some of them will appear coming from Reserved ASNs for Private Use:

• 2803:f800:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:1 - B

• 2803:f800:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:2 - R

• 2803:f800:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:3 - A

• 2803:f800:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:4 - V

• 2803:f800:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:cfcf:5 - O

Subtract 4200000000, it will give you one byte for each character of the secret word.

Repeat until the word is decoded.

Interested in helping build a better internet and drive security online? Cloudflare is hiring.

Black Friday by Per-Olof Forsberg, license: CC BY 2.0

To try and answer this question, we took a look at anonymised samples of HTTP requests crossing our network. First of all, let’s look at total page views from across our global network from the last few weeks and see if we can spot Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

All page views

So this is total page views by day (UTC) from November 19 (a week before Cyber Monday) until Monday December 3. Other than follow-the-sun fluctuations in a repeating daily pattern, each whole day is pretty similar in shape and size compared to the last. Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t visible in overall traffic patterns.

We have a very diverse set of customers across 12 million domain names and not all of them are selling products or doing so directly online. To identify those websites that are, I used metadata from the wonderful HTTP Archive project to export a list of domains using Cloudflare that were also running ecommerce software.

Here are the page views for these ecommerce sites over the same time period:

Ecommerce page views

So we can see clearly that our ecommerce customers are seeing a big increase in page views on November 23 and 26. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are most certainly a thing. This year Black Friday was quite a bit busier than Cyber Monday - around 22% busier in terms of page views. If we compare the page views of each day to the week prior, we can see the changes clearly:

% page view change vs previous week

The uplift starts on Wednesday but really kicks in during Thanksgiving with an increase of more than 100% on Black Friday.

So we’ve established that these shopping days are important in terms of visitor activity. More pages are being viewed on these days - but is anyone buying anything?

We’re dealing with trillions of requests across a really large data set of different websites without any specific knowledge of what a purchase transaction would look like for each - so to approximate this I took a crude approach, which is to look for successful checkout interactions in the data. If you imagine a typical ecommerce application makes a purchase with a HTTP request like “POST /store/checkout HTTP/1.1” we can look for requests similar to this to understand the activity.

% of checkout interactions vs prior week

We can see here that Black Friday has an almost 200% increase in checkout interactions compared to the previous Friday.

Using this raw number of checkout interactions to compare with the page views we have something approximating a conversion %. This is not a true conversion figure - calculating a true conversion figure would require data that identifies individuals and detailed action tracking for each website. What we have is the total number of page views (HTTP requests that return HTML successfully) compared to the total number of POST requests to a checkout. This gives us a baseline to compare changes in “conversion” over these big November shopping days:

% of checkout interactions / page views vs prior week

Each bar on this chart represents the % change in checkout interactions as a proportion of page views compared to the same day the previous week. We can see this increased by 45% on Black Friday compared to the Friday before (boring old beige Friday November 16). The following Saturday was booming at 60% - because we’re dealing with time in UTC, a UTC Saturday actually includes Black Friday traffic for some parts of the world, the same can be said of Tuesday which contains overlap from Cyber Monday - we’ll break this down a bit later.

On Cyber Monday, the increase actually beats Black Friday, meaning page views lead to cart interactions 57% more often than the prior Monday (boring old vanilla Monday November 19), albeit from a lower number of transactions.

What we see here is just how much more browsing people do on mobiles today vs desktop, with mobile winning most days:

Page Views by Device Type

When it comes to checkout interactions though, we can see the situation is switched with visitors more likely to interact with the checkout on a desktop overall, but even more so on Black Friday (14% more likely) and Cyber Monday (20% more likely).

Checkout Interaction as % of Page Views

Let’s look at a specific region to understand more, starting with the US:

USA Page Views (PST)

We can see a more normal weekday pattern on the prior Thursday & Friday (15 & 16 Nov) whereby desktop page views eclipse mobile during the daytime while people are at their desks. In the evenings and weekends, mobile takes over. What we see from the 21st onward is evidence of people taking time off work and doing more with their mobile devices. Even on Thanksgiving, there is still a big rise in activity as people start gearing up for Friday’s deals or finding ways to avoid political discussion with relatives at home!

On Cyber Monday, traffic earlier in the day is lower as people return to work, however we are seeing heavy use of desktop devices. As the working day ends, mobile once again dominates. Things begin to settle back into a more regular pattern from Tuesday November 27 onwards.

Let's take a look at checkout interaction over the Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend by device type.

USA Checkout Interaction % (PST)

Despite all of that mobile browsing activity, desktop devices are more commonly used for checkout actions. People seem to browse more on mobile, committing to buy more often with desktop, it may also just be that mobile users have more distractions both on the device and in the real world and are therefore less likely to complete a purchase. From personal experience, I also think the poor mobile optimisation of some sites’ checkout flows make desktop preferrable - and when customers are incentivised with discounts & deals, they are more likely to switch devices to complete a transaction if they hit an issue.

It might be obvious if you’re reading this from the UK, but despite the fact that Thanksgiving is not a holiday here, retailers have very much picked up the mantle from US retailers and seized the opportunity to drive sales over this weekend.

UK Page Views (UTC)

Page views to ecommerce websites on Cloudflare look very similar in shape to the US on Black Friday. However, mobile is more dominant in the UK, even during working hours. It’s worth noting one big difference here - Cyber Monday in the UK was only 22% up in terms of page views compared to the prior Monday - in the US the increase was more than 4x that.

UK Checkout Interaction as % of Page Views

When it comes to checkout, it also looks like UK visitors to ecommerce sites commit more with their mobile, but desktop is still more likely to lead to more conversion.

Taking Germany as another example, here’s how page views look:

Germany Page Views (CET)

Desktop use during typical working hours is much more pronounced in Germany. Black Friday and Cyber Monday show higher page views than a normal Friday / Monday but the difference is much smaller than regions such as the US & UK.

Black Friday is spreading internationally despite these still being normal working days for the rest of the world. Cyber Monday is also increasing ecommerce activity internationally but tends to be quieter than Black Friday. Overall, mobile browsing eclipses desktop, but those desktop page views tend to lead to checkout more often.

Retailers should continue to invest in making their mobile & desktop ecommerce experiences fast & resilient to seize on these key days.

With the holiday season in full swing, it's only fitting that we continue to spread cheer, joy and a faster Internet around the world. To start the season we begin in Canada with NHL rivals Montreal and Vancouver, our 70th and 71st points of presence (PoPs) globally. Montreal and Vancouver, the 2nd and 3rd largest Canadian metropolitan areas, respectively, join our existing PoP in Canada's largest, Toronto.

Together, CloudFlare's network in Canada is now milliseconds away from the country's 31 million Internet users. As of now, the web sites, mobile apps and APIs of all CloudFlare customers are delivered at a cool 6.1 million times the speed of the fastest slapshot (for the curious, the current NHL speed record belongs to Zdeno Chára of the Boston Bruins, whose slapshot clocked 108.8 miles per hour / 175.1 kilometers per hour).

Canada is not just one of the most wired countries in the world, with nearly 87 per cent of Canadian households connected to the Internet, but also one of the largest as measured by e-commerce transaction volume. According to Statistics Canada, Canadian enterprises sold more than US$100 billion in goods and services over the Internet in 2013, up from US$87 billion a year earlier. Interestingly, the median amount spent on retail e-commerce transactions is substantially higher for Canadian-domiciled web sites (including the Canadian arms of US e-commerce giants) than sites selling into Canada that are domiciled in the US. One significant factor mentioned in this dichotomy is latency.

Latency matters. Almost seven years ago, Amazon published a remarkable statistic: the online retail giant found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Executives from Google and Microsoft presented data demonstrating that even small delays of under half a second impact business metrics. Today, a broker could lose millions in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is even a few milliseconds behind the competition. Of course, if you're a CloudFlare user you needn't worry about this.

Montreal and Vancouver are the first of several new data centers we have planned for this holiday season. While each new site is another step in our quest to conquer latency, be sure to also check out our HTTP/2 demo and our HTTP/2 guide for developers to further optimize your web applications on CloudFlare.

— Happy Holidays from the CloudFlare team

Even though CloudFlare offsets most of the load to your website via caching and request filtering, a certain amount of traffic will still pass through to your host. Knowing the limits of your plan can help prevent a bottleneck from your hosting plan.

CloudFlare allows you to block IP address individually or IPs from entire regions. If you don’t want or need traffic from certain IPs or regions, you can block them using your Threat Control panel. This is useful for sites who know where their visitors usually come from.

Take action to prevent attacks to your site during peak season by configuring your firewall to only accept traffic from CloudFlare IP addresses during the holidays. If you only accept CloudFlare IPs, you can prevent attackers from getting to your original IP address and knocking your site offline.

CloudFlare operates as a reverse proxy to your site so all connections come from CloudFlare IPs, so restricting our IPs can cause issues for visitors trying to access your site. The list of our IP can be found here: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips

By default CloudFlare caches static content with our CDN; however, you can extend our caching by creating custom Page Rules. Under the Page Rules section of your account, you can set a pattern--either your entire website, or a section of your site--then turn on the “Cache everything” option. Creating a page rule and setting the Cache Everything option helps reduce the number of times CloudFlare has to hit your origin to download cacheable items.

Setting up a custom Page Rule like this is ideal if you have a campaign going on over the holiday season. With the Cache Everything option enabled, CloudFlare will be serving your entire site, taking the load off of your server completely, making you site as fast as possible.

Edge Cache Expire TTL and the Browser Cache Expire TTL allows you to determine how long we cache resources at our edge, and how long browsers will cache assets.

To ensure visitor’s IPs show in your back-end server logs you can install mod_cloudflare to restore original visitor IP back to server logs. Our IP addresses will show up in your logs unless you install the modification to make sure you are logging the visitors’ actual IP addresses.

Auto Minification is a method that helps your site send as little information as possible to increase performance. It works by taking JavaScript, CSS, and HTML and removing all comments and white spaces.

Rocket Loader is an asynchronous JavaScript loader. It ensures that individual scripts on your page won’t block other content from loading, loads third party scripts in the order they are ready, and bundles all script into a single request so multiple responses can be streamed---in short, it makes your page render much faster on any device.

At a high level, Rocket Loader works like this:

(Available for Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans)Mirage will determine which images are visible to the end user and send those first, then other images that are off the screen will be lazy loaded as needed. This feature is especially useful for sites that with many images like most ecommerce sites

For example: if your sites has a images of seventy different t-shirts for sale, rather than having the customer wait for all seventy images to load, Mirage quickly delivers the images immediately visible to the user, then loads the rest of the images as the customer scrolls down. By having the most important images load lightning fast, the end user’s experience is improved.

(Available for Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans)Polish recompresses images to make them as small as possible in order to increase site performance.

For example: You may have images on your site that are not optimally compressed. When CloudFlare puts those images into cache it will automatically recompress them making them smaller, and allowing them to be loaded as quickly as possible. CloudFlare can compress images in a lossless or lossy way.

If you want to make quick changes to your page and have your visitors see that change immediately, you can purge individual files from CloudFlare’s cache.

For example, if you are running a sale only for Black Friday, and you want new content displayed to your visitors, you can purge a single page so that CloudFlare will return to your origin server to fetch a new version of that page for our cache.

Please Note: if you purge your entire cache your origin will receive a flood of traffic until CloudFlare get all of your assets back into our cache.

Even if you don’t implement any of the suggestions above you are still ahead of the game by being on CloudFlare’s network. Since we have 28 data centers around the world, we bring your site close to your visitors. And since we run an Anycast network, visitors are automatically directed to the closest data center meaning that your site will be faster as the request travels over a shorter distance.

We wish you all the best this holiday season! Good luck!

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!

Looking at the latest DDoS attack statistics from CloudFlare's network, it seems that hackers love the holidays.

Zooming in on November and December 2012 it's not hard to spot when Thanksgiving 2012 happened. Fully 1/5 of the attacks that CloudFlare saw in November and December (so far) happened on the Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving:

In the past we've seen drops in DDoS attacks on some holidays because the home and office machines used as bots in those attacks have been turned off. For example, this year we noticed a large drop in attack activity on Earth Day (when people are encouraged to switch off their machines to save the planet). But this year's Thanksgiving attack statistics indicate that plenty of hacked machines were online through the holiday.

But what does this tell us about the coming Christmas holiday period? To answer that we can look back to December 2011. CloudFlare has DDoS data for December 11, 2011 to January 1, 2012 which shows two distinct peaks of attack activity: one just before Christmas and one just after.

So, if 2011 is a guide DDoS attackers will be taking a few days off over Christmas, but will be keeping the pressure on just before and immediately after. That's probably not a surprise as some fo the attackers will be attempting to disrupt businesses during critical periods for pre- and post-Christmas sales.

Even though there's a Christmas lull, that doesn't mean that CloudFlare staff will be letting down their guard, however. We'll be here working to ensure that whenever attacks arise and from whereever we're ready to absorb and deflect them.

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.

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)

CloudFlare sees traffic for hundreds of thousands of websites so we were able to answer that question by looking at the average percentage of requests that constitute threats, graphing the deviation, and then overlaying any events happening on those days. The answer to whether hackers take holidays off: it depends on the holiday. Shawn wrote a great piece using our data for his publication, but we wanted to highlight what we found here as well.

Looking at the hundreds of billions of requests that CloudFlare has received over the last year, approximately 15% of them were some sort of threat. The percentage ranges depending on the size of the site, but the deviation is less than we would have guessed. The majority of these attacks are automated bots scraping for emails or scanning for vulnerabilities.

As the graph above shows, the percentage of requests that are attacks varies from a low of about 5 percent to a high of almost 25 percent. Some of the swings depend on the day of the week. For example, Saturday is a relatively low day for legitimate web traffic, but a relatively high day for attacks, so the percentage of threat traffic generally ticks up on Saturdays.

After we plotted the percentage of threat traffic we mapped it to a calendar of major holidays around the world. Generally, the major holidays in the United States from May - November did not see a drop in traffic. In fact, holidays like Halloween, Veterans' Day, and Mother's Day saw spikes in threat traffic. The biggest drops in attack traffic occurred around the start of the summer holiday season (August 1) and during Golden Week, the national Chinese holiday.

Most of the major attacks that we see originate from China and Eastern Europe, so the holidays could indicate that the European attackers are taking time off for classic summer vacation or Chinese attackers are stepping away from the keyboard to celebrate China's nationhood. That seems like it would indicate the attackers themselves are European or Chinese, but I don't think that's necessarily a valid conclusion to draw.

Most of the online attacks today use computers compromised by viruses to form a so-called botnet. Computers with unlicensed versions of Windows, or that don't have up-to-date anti-virus software, are particularly susceptible to infection. Eastern Europe, and to an even greater respect, China have a higher-than-average percentage of infected machines. The fact that the attacks originate from these regions don't necessarily mean the attackers are there, but rather that the botnets they are using to launch the attacks are.

So what's happening when there are big drops in traffic? It may be that a lot of the compromised computers in China are in office that are shut down for the Golden Week celebrations. In other words, it could be not that the attackers themselves take the holiday off, but rather that the resources they use to launch attacks aren't as available during certain holidays.

The graph above doesn't show Christmas or New Years. Last year we saw a run up in attacks prior to Christmas and then a significant drop off on Christmas itself, and an even larger drop on New Year's Day. We didn't have the scale last year to draw meaningful conclusions, but we'll be watching carefully this year and report back after we see what happened.

This is the story of two things that are deeply American: post-Thanksgiving shopping and scrappy entrepreneurs.

On the fourth Thursday in November, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving. The Friday after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, is considered the official start of the holiday shopping season. It is typically the busiest (offline) shopping day of the year. Shopping after Thanksgiving is so deeply engrained in American culture that in 1939 in the midst of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on the last day of the month, then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week in order to get people out and spending more quickly.

Retailers today are attuned to this tradition and offer specials to lure customers to their stores. People literally will camp out for a week in front of some retailers in order to be the first in line when the stores open Friday morning. If you're reading this outside the United States and think it sounds crazy, rest assured that most of us here do as well. That said, suffice it to say that there is a high demand among many for the details of the Black Friday deals.

Just as American as shopping after Thanksgiving is the fact that if the market demands something, scrappy entrepreneurs will step up to meet that demand. In this case, the website 2011BlackFridayAds.com provides a one-stop resource to find out what all the biggest retailers will be offering. The site was created by Ty Price, who has been tracking Black Friday deals since 2008. This year, if you search Google for "Black Friday 2011," among the more than 71 million sites returned, Ty's is the first result.

Ty had been through this before and knew the amount of traffic to his site could spike significantly in the days leading up to Black Friday. So, in late September, he signed up for CloudFlare to help manage the coming load. Because 2011BlackFridayAds.com is hosted through MediaTemple, one of CloudFlare's hosting partners, setting up our service took literally two clicks and less than a minute. The graph below shows the growth in traffic over the last month, peaking in the last 24 hours at nearly 3 million page views a day (about 35 per second).

Turns out a lot of people want to see Black Friday deals, and we're proud to have helped ensure 2011BlackFridayAds.com stay up and running under crushing load. CloudFlare didn't just make the site safer and protect it from attacks, we also significantly reduced the load on the servers so they could keep up with visitors' requests. In fact, CloudFlare cut the number of requests that needed to be handled by the server by nearly half a billion, or about 75% of the total load it would have experienced without CloudFlare. We also saved the site more than 23 Terabytes, 93% of the bandwidth that would have otherwise been used serving the site's pages.

Any downtime experienced by a site is quickly punished by Google,meaning that even if you have an initially popular site, if you can't stay online you can't stay on top. CloudFlare helped 2011BlackFridayAds.com stay fast and reliable, even under a crushing load, and the effect has kept it at the top of the rankings and kept the traffic growing. Speed and reliability are the foundation of SEO.

As Ty just wrote me via email: "CloudFlare has done wonders for us this year. It's amazing how fast the site is." Helping ensure the sites of entrepreneurs like Ty could perform as well as the big companies' is why we — a scrappy group of entrepreneurs ourselves — built CloudFlare in the first place.

While Black Friday is the biggest offline retail shopping day, the Monday after Black Friday, a day now known as Cyber Monday, is reportedly the largest for online shopping. Everyone in the U.S. returns to work, still in a shopping mood, and takes any downtime at their desks to scour Internet retailers for gifts. If you're an online business, you literally can't afford to go down. And, if you're a eMerchant who finds yourself worried over the coming days that your site might fail, spend the few minutes it takes to sign up for CloudFlare. Our basic service is free (Ty uses the PRO version for$20/month), it doesn't require any technical skill to setup, and it will work regardless of your platform.

The biggest Internet retailer in the world is Amazon.com. As of today, CloudFlare powers 5x the traffic of Amazon. In other words, if you're worried about a crush of traffic to your website over the coming holiday season, we're here for you and happy to help.

For those camped out in front of a Walmart for Black Friday, stay warm and make sure to check 2011BlackFridayAds.com from your smart phone for a preview of the latest deals. For those watching from the sidelines, check back to these pages after Cyber Monday for reports on Internet traffic patterns we saw.

And, for those in the United States, have a very Happy Thanksgiving.

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.

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!_