The past few years have been marked by tremendous growth for CloudFlare. At the time of our last fundraising in December 2012, CloudFlare was a team of 37 operating a network in 23 cities and 15 countries—today we number over 200 with a presence in 62 cities and 33 countries. We’ve grown from delivering 85 billion page views per month for 500 thousand customers to nearly 1 trillion each month across 4 million Internet properties, all the while protecting our customers from hundreds of billions of cyber threats. The growth and resonance of our service since CloudFlare’s founding 5 years ago is beyond our wildest of expectations, but it is only in the coming years that our scale and efforts to build a better Internet will become visible.

In 2016 alone we will more than double our global presence, increase the size of our network by an order of magnitude, and with that allow millions of new businesses and online publishers to accelerate and secure their online applications and harness the growing power of the Internet economy. Our service is built on the simple premise that any individual or business should be able to quickly and easily ensure the global performance and availability of their websites and mobile apps, and withstand withering and sophisticated cyber attacks—all without a single piece of hardware, or the need to build a global network and the team of engineers to manage it all.

To sustain this level of growth requires investment. In this pursuit we’re pleased to announce that we have raised $110 million from Fidelity, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Qualcomm and our existing investors. Beyond the additional capital raised, the broad, strategic participation in the round from many of the world’s leading technology firms validates the opportunity ahead of us, and positions us for the next chapter of our growth.

But before we write this new chapter, a bit about how we got here.

Seismic shifts are the sorts of groundbreaking developments that fundamentally alter the ways in which organizations and industries operate. We came upon a few such shifts as CloudFlare was founded in 2009. Although these shifts were already well underway, their strength has increased logarithmically each year.

These shifts are the massive movement of commerce and communication online, and the rapidly evolving means by which organizations deploy applications, increasingly in the cloud. Had one started a business in 2009, their first call might very well have been to Dell or HP to purchase servers (ours was to HP!), followed by calls to Oracle and Microsoft for the databases and software necessary to deliver the applications across the final tier of Internet hierarchy, the network edge. It is in this last tier that companies like Cisco capitalized on the last seismic shift at the network edge—the need to process and manage an explosion of network traffic directed towards the applications, and storage and compute platforms beneath.

Excerpt from our fundraising presentation titled "Scalability and elasticity of the cloud will prevail"

Today it is almost inconceivable that an upstart business would purchase a single piece of hardware, much less call anyone to procure it. In less time, with less cost, and more elasticity, an organization can turn up any number of storage and compute instances on cloud based platforms. The on-premise, perpetual license-based software and databases of yesteryear are now also available as services. Even complex applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP) systems are now largely dominated by software as a service (SaaS) offerings. CloudFlare is now pioneering this same shift at the network edge. In other words, it’s time to say farewell to hardware appliances.

The network edge can be broadly described as the “control plane” for all traffic directed to the layers below. This control plane ensures that traffic to the layers below consistently reaches its destination, that authorized users receive appropriate access, and that hackers are kept at bay. Each of these appliances (e.g., firewalls, load balancers, DDoS mitigation appliances, WAN optimizers, malware scanners, authentication devices, among many others) look for patterns in traffic, apply stored rules against the patterns, and make network I/O decisions to block, re-route, and compress, among many other functions. Now, CloudFlare is able to perform each of these functions without a single piece of customer hardware, and across a global network with immensely greater scale and elasticity, and a small fraction of the latency and cost.

Excerpt from our fundraising presentation titled "The network edge now expands beyond the data center"

This shift at the network edge is further driven by its expansion, as well as the blurring of its perimeter (security jargon for the line delineating assets to be protected). This expansion is occurring across multiple vectors. Organizations now deploy their applications across multiple geographies to reduce latency, across disparate physical and cloud environments for redundancy and elasticity, and adopt third party SaaS applications to replace internal business systems. What used to be solved by hardware appliances is now far better solved by cloud services.

CloudFlare is the new control plane for the network edge. With a simple DNS change, traffic to an organization’s applications and store and compute environment are directed through CloudFlare’s global network no matter where they reside geographically, logically or virtually. With one of the largest edge networks globally, we can perform each of the aforementioned edge functions to accelerate, secure and ensure the availability of the applications behind us with blazing fast speed, absolute elasticity and an enormous return on investment compared to hardware based solutions.

This is our vision, and one that is now shared with many of the world’s leading technology firms (and investors). Each of Fidelity, Microsoft, Baidu, Qualcomm and Google are uniquely positioned to support CloudFlare’s evolution in a rapidly evolving environment, and address key questions. What is our mobile strategy? What is our China strategy? How are we going to succeed with large enterprises? Will other giants partner or compete with you? How does CloudFlare become a public company?

Our choice of investors should hopefully provide some insight into our answers to each of these questions. Moreover, each of the participants in our round agreed to invest in the company without any special control provisions, board representation, economic treatment or even information rights. It was important for us as a company to continue to execute against our vision without distraction.

We don’t precisely know, but if the past is any indicator, it may continue to be beyond our expectations. In a fun bit of CloudFlare history, we unearthed an e-mail between two of CloudFlare’s founders from May 2009.

What might have sounded delusional to many five years ago (and they probably would have been right at the time), is a reality today. Five years later, and built upon the contributions of a talented team, our steadfast customers, and an unparalleled group of investors, we are well on the path to building something big and unique.

We’re always looking for feedback. You asked for an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, and we delivered. Encryption and SSL certificates? Now free, and included with all plans. A larger network to serve your global visitor base? We’re 62 deep, and not stopping. This feedback has helped tremendously over the past 5 years, so please keep it coming as we tackle the next five.

We’re looking for new team members. Great people who are passionate about building a better Internet, and willing to tackle big problems. We are building a service that allows anyone to run a website or mobile app as fast and secure as the Internet giants, improving the surfing experience for over 2 billion Internet users, and empowering millions of businesses to securely transact online each day. If that sounds interesting, check out our job postings here.

Thanks for your support over the past five years.

—The CloudFlare team

Michelle, Lee and I started working on CloudFlare back in early 2009. It took about a year and a half for us to fully bake the idea, hire a team, write the code, build the start of a network, sign up beta customers to kick the tires, and then finally release CloudFlare to the public. On September 27, 2010, CloudFlare launched and so we think of today as our birthday. We're posting this two years to the minute from the moment CloudFlare went live to the public. Here's the video of our launch presentation:

The last two years have been a whirlwind. Two years ago, we proudly announced on stage that we had 1,000 websites using CloudFlare during its initial year and a half of beta. Today, we have more than half a million and regularly sign up several thousand a day. Two years ago, we had seen 6 million unique IPs connect to our network. Today, we see about 600 million unique IPs connecting every month. Two years ago, we had powered 50 million page views. Today, we've powered more than half a trillion.

There is a lot of technology and infrastructure that has gone into building CloudFlare — we've literally added a new data center a month for every month since we launched, a pace we plan to continue. However, the real key to our scaling as quickly as we have has been CloudFlare's incredible team. There were eight of us that launched on stage two years ago. It was an incredible group. What I'm proud of is that, as the company has grown, we've continued to attract people who reflect that original team: great engineers who are also really good people.

I don't know of any other company in the world that handles a billion page views per month per employee — we handle two billion. The challenge and opportunity of working at CloudFlare is that when you push a line of code it affects over 200 million people in the next 24 hours. If you want to make an impact and learn how to work at real scale, there is no better place today than CloudFlare.

So what do we want for our birthday? Just to continue to grow and help build a better Internet. You can help. If you're already a CloudFlare customer, take a second to sign up another one of your websites, add a CloudFlare badge, or to tell your friends and colleagues about us. And, the best present of all, if CloudFlare seems like a place you'd thrive, then check out our careers page to apply to join our team.

Last year, we were surprised to learn that Google shared today as their birthday. We're fond of Google and see a lot of what we're doing as following in their footsteps. As we said when we launched, CloudFlare is bringing the resources previously reserved for the Internet giants to the rest of the web. Echoing Google, our mission is to build a faster, safer, better web. Two years in, we're well on our way.

Today, CloudFlare adds more than 250 new customers every six hours or so, but getting our first 250 took several months and a lot of faith from our earliest adopters. When we started working on CloudFlare, an employee at a major CDN company warned us that we had no idea all the crazy things people did with their websites. He wasn't kidding. For the first sites that signed up, we usually made them slower and offered little additional protection. But, over time, and with the patience of our first users, we incorporated everything we learned from each new site and built something great.

The core value proposition of CloudFlare has always been that the system gets smarter and faster with each new website that joins. In that sense, CloudFlare is a community. When an attack is launched against any one site, knowledge about that attack is immediately shared across the rest of the network. Similarly, we use data from the performance of sites on CloudFlare to help tune optimizations for each new site that joins.

Today CloudFlare's community is made up of hundreds of thousands of sites, and each new site that joins continues to make the system better. Together we have brought the resources previously reserved only for the Internet giants to the rest of the web, and we've grown into a giant ourselves. We now power more page views per month than Twitter, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, Zynga, AOL, Apple, and Bing — combined. We have big plans for tomorrow and ways we are continuing to work to save the web, but we'll always remember that we couldn't have done it without you.

From the whole CloudFlare team, thank you!

P.S. - Want to have an even bigger impact? We're always hiring and we usually get our best candidates from our existing users.

We regularly monitor the Alexa top 1 million websites for trends. Specifically, we've been tracking how many of them support IPv6 connections. The numbers are still low but have been improving. About 1% of the 1 million largest websites on the Internet now accept and properly support IPv6 connections. What's pretty cool is that about 10% of those that do accept IPv6 connections do so via CloudFlare's free Automatic IPv6 Gateway. There's a long way to go, but we're proud of our part of expanding the modern Internet.

In the next few hours, CloudFlare will cross having served more than 100 billion page views over the last year. We've been growing very quickly. To give you a sense, a quarter of the total page views for the year (about 25 billion) has come in just the last 30 days.

We are now averaging more than 60,000 request per second. Peak load is even higher. According to Google's traffic stats, there are only 9 websites on the Internet that power more page views than CloudFlare (Google.com, Facebook.com, Yahoo.com, Live.com, Baidu.com, QQ.com, Yahoo.co.jp, Orkut.com.br and Vkontakte.ru), and only 7 that see more unique visitors (Google.com, Facebook.com, Youtube.com, Yahoo.com, Live.com, MSN.com, and Wikipedia.org).

Today we have more than 150 gigabits per second of capacity across the CloudFlare network. Before the end of the year we plan to bring online our 14th data center, and we just placed the order this morning to increase server capacity in 9 of our existing data centers by 40% before year's end. And just wait to see what we have in store for 2012.

Stay tuned...

Sometime on Sunday, November 13, 2011 (which was a pretty awesome day on its own, quite aside from this news) we crossed the point of having saved our users 2 petabytes of bandwidth. That's a staggering amount of data. According to Wolfram Alpha, it's the equivalent of all the data on the Internet Archive circa 2006, 1/46th of the "deep Internet" today, or the total estimated storage of an average human brain.

We're continuing to save users almost a gigabyte of data a second. You can watch the savings tick up on our network map. Pretty incredible when you compare us against services that charge by the byte.

If you're on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google AppEngine or another host that charges you for bandwidth, CloudFlare won't just make your site faster, it will do so while actually saving you money. In other words, CloudFlare's basic service isn't just free, it's less than free.

The team (now 20) loaded in a bus to head to Murphys, CA on Thursday. I had suggested we watch "The Descent" on the ride up. Somehow Michelle was convinced it was an inspirational film about people surviving getting stuck in a cave. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's not exactly that.

We had a great dinner at Angelo's Steakhouse Italiano which was very good and the staff was a lot of fun. Sri only had to leave once during dinner to fend off a DDoS attack.

The night ended with karaoke at a local in Murphys where we learned that we are much better at making the web faster and safer than we are at singing or playing pool.

The next morning the team loaded back in the bus to head to the Moaning Caverns. If you've ever been on a cave tour where you walk along a well lit path with railings safe for school groups, this wasn't that. Instead, it started with getting suited up for a rappel down nearly 200 feet into the cave.

The guide's advice that you "never let go of the rope" was punctuated by the large pile of at least 30,000 years worth of fossilized bones piled directly below the hole we were rappelling into.

Chris here is hanging about 160 feet above the cave floor in a cavern large enough that it could hold the Statue of Liberty.

Matthieu's rock climbing experience made him a natural.

We don't have any pictures of what happened next because the guides advised us if we brought cameras in they would likely get crushed, smashed, scratched or broken. That wasn't exaggeration. Over the next several hours we made our way through chambers and tight passages like the Roach Motel, the Meat Grinder, the Guillotine, and the Birth Canal. To give you a sense, this is a photo from the cave's website showing someone emerging from the Meat Grinder.

When I first saw the photo I thought it couldn't really be like that. I was wrong, it is exactly like that. We squeezed through holes I wouldn't have thought I could ever fit through. I'm a little clausterphobic, so it was a mental challenge for me. Having colleagues I trust from Team CloudFlare on the journey helped in those times I wasn't sure I could do it. It was very intense and unlike anything I've ever done before.

At several points along the journey you could exit if you weren't feeling up for the next challenge (I made it to Godzilla's Nostril). Six of the team made it all the way to the end, 45 feet straight up the Chimney and then down the appropriately named Wedgie Hill.

Muddy? Yes. Bruised? A little. Shellshocked? Probably still the next day. But closer as a team and a little more confident we can overcome any challenge.

Sound like fun? We're growing quickly and always looking for smart, talented, and adventurous people to join our team and help make the Internet faster, safer, and better.

I was just looking over our daily stats report and noticed something incredible. In the last 30 days, CloudFlare saved our users more than half a petabyte of data they would have otherwise had to transfer from their servers.

That's 500 terabytes, 500 million megabytes, or approximately the equivalent data contained in 1 billion books. That's not the total data we transferred, which is even more, that's the amount of data we saved users from having to transfer. To give you a sense of the value, if all our users were buying their bandwidth from Amazon Web Services then we would have collectively saved them more than $60,000 in bandwidth fees just last month.

On average, we save users about 60% of the bandwidth and 65% of the requests their origin servers would have otherwise had to handle -- decreasing bandwidth usage and server load. And we're refining our caching algorithms to make them even better. Pretty incredible.

We're ending the week on a high. About an hour ago we crossed 10 billion page views having been powered by CloudFlare over the last 30 days. Those pages were served to about 250 million unique visitors. To put it in perspective, that means more than 13% of worldwide Internet visitors passed through our network at least once in the last month. That's almost 100 million more unique visitors than Twitter, and more than 3 billion more page views than Wikipedia, over the same period. It's also a lot more than we were doing just a month ago ourselves. We're now averaging over 25,000 requests per second. All I can say is: Wow. Great job team!

Kevin, the visual designer who recently joined CloudFlare's team, pulled together this graph the other day. Even having lived through the last 10 months, it's still incredible to see them represented here. We reached 100 million people experiencing the benefits of CloudFlare's network about seven months after our launch. After that, it took us only three more months to cross 200 million. And our growth has continued to accelerate: as of this morning, just a couple weeks after crossing 200 million, more than 230 million people every month now experience a faster, safer Internet because of CloudFlare.

One thing that I find particularly interesting about this graph is a similarity between most of these fast-growing companies. With the notable exception of Zynga (and to a lesser extend Yahoo) they have all built platforms that enhance other people's content. YouTube allowed anyone to publish their own videos. Similarly, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook let anyone share their own personal and professional details with a broad audience. In some ways, Google's platform is backward of the others -- taking other people's content and overlaying an index to make it searchable -- but the core idea of making other people's content better is the same.

Several months ago, I was talking with one of the famous, gray-haired engineers of Silicon Valley and he said, "What CloudFlare really is is the YouTube for websites." I have to confess that didn't entirely click for me until Kevin showed me this graph. There were ways to publish videos online prior to YouTube, but the company made doing so faster, easier, and better. There are ways to publish websites prior toCloudFlare, but what we've built is building a transparent platform to make any website faster, safer, and better.

This is an incredibly rewarding job, but today was particularly fun. We sat one of the conference rooms in the CFHQ and planned the rollout of what we're launching next. The Internet continues to suffer many challenges, but we think we've built a platform that can continue to help solve many of them. Stay tuned...

Two months ago, our CEO Matthew Prince shared news about CloudFlare's growth, Rocket Loader, and CloudFlare Apps (video) at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC.

Today, we'd like to update you about CloudFlare Apps, the one-click simple way to integrate the best services for website owners. We've had more than 14,000 installs to date, across a diverse ecosystem, and there's so much more possible.

On June 1st, we introduced our first App, VigLink. The rest of the month saw an explosion of choices.

We launched the following Apps, in order:

• VigLink (affiliate links)

• Apture Highlights (contextual search)

• Google Analytics (analytics)

• Google Webmaster Tools (webmaster tools)

• Pingdom (website uptime monitoring)

• UserVoice (support)

• SnapEngage (live chat)

• Clicky Web Analytics (analytics)

• Monitis (server monitoring)

• Zoompf (web performance scanning)

• ExceptionHub (JavaScript error tracking)

• StopTheHacker (malware scanning)

• CDNJS Selections (JavaScript libraries)

• Browser Blaster (game)

• GlobalSign HackAlert (malware detection)

• CodeGuard (website backup)

We are very grateful to all the partners who helped us create a fantastic "instant on" experience. We're proud to make these services available to our customers, and couldn't have hoped for a better beginning.

That said...we're just getting started. The last few weeks have been devoted to refining our process, improving the already live Apps, and preparing our next round of releases.

Our partners -- and prospective partners -- will soon benefit from more documentation, code examples, test accounts, screencasts, and other tools based on our experience launching so many diverse services. Multiple plans, approval stages for customer signup, upgrade notification, DNS changes, JavaScript techniques and placement, and a host of other important details are supported now (or will be added shortly)...and soon will be documented, accelerating development.

The majority of CloudFlare Apps are businesses, and we are happy to seamless integrate their services for our customers. Of course, it's not only businesses who have something to offer. There's a complementary approach: independent developers (Browser Blaster) and open-source teams (CDNJS) also provide fun or valuable utility for website owners. As we provide more self-service tools, we expect and encourage more of this kind of organic offering.

Dozens of new services are coming, starting with image/video advertising and translation.

We are always looking for magic, when we (jointly, with our partner) exceed your expectations for how easy it could possibly be to make your website better. What's especially fun is to do this in categories we'd never even considered. Stay tuned!

CloudFlare website owners, tell us what apps you'd like to see, whether you're already using the suggested service or contemplating it.

Running a service that's interesting to website owners? Want to make it one-click simple for CloudFlare customers to use your service? Put a domain on CloudFlare yourself (free) to try CloudFlare Apps for yourself, and let us know if you'd like to be included.

About 8 months ago I posted a blog post about how CloudFlare had served 1 billion requests that month. It was quite a milestone for our young startup. This week we crossed a new milestone: now serving more than 1 billion requests every day. In other words, we've grown about 3,000% in 8 months. Great job team!!

Cloudflare passed a big milestone yesterday: over the last 30 days we'veserved more than 1 billion requests. The Cloudflare network isarchitected to handle many, many times this level traffic, but it'sstill pretty amazing to realize the extent of what already powering.