CloudFlare accelerates 235,000 websites

Just over two years since its launch, the CloudFlare content
distribution network is being actively used to accelerate traffic to
more than 235,000 websites in Netcraft's Web Server Survey. In total,
we found 785,000 sites currently configured to use CloudFlare's DNS
servers. Once a domain has been configured to use these servers, any
of its subdomains can be routed through the CloudFlare system at the
click of a button. Paying customers can also route their traffic
through CloudFlare by setting up a CNAMEwithin their own DNS.
CloudFlare's network is globally spread across 23 datacenters, half of
which are entirely remotely operated. Nine of these datacenters were
opened during a month-long expansion effort which ended in August and
resulted in a 70% increase in network capacity. CloudFlare's content
distribution network spreads website content around these datacenters,
allowing visitors to request pages from geographically closer
locations. This typically reduces the number of network hops,
resulting in an average request taking less than 30ms.
In addition to moving static files closer to visitors, CloudFlare also
offers an automatic web optimisation feature called Rocket Loader.
This combines multiple JavaScript files into a single request, which
saves both time and bandwidth. Pro, Business and Enterprise users can
also enable beta support for SPDYrequests, which achieve better
latency than HTTP through the use of compression, multiplexing and
prioritisation.
In October, CloudFlare introduced support for OCSP stapling, which it
claims has increased the speed of SSL requests by 30%. The Online
Certificate Status Protocolallows browsers to ask a certificate
authority (CA) whether an SSL certificate it has issued has been
revoked. Handling these requests in realtime can be challenging,
particularly if the CA has issued a large number of certificates, or
has issued certificates to extremely busy websites. OCSP stapling
solves this problem by delivering the OCSP response directly from
CloudFlare's network, removing the need for the browser to perform an
additional DNS lookup and send a request to the CA's own OCSP server.
OCSP performance is often overlooked when considering which CA to buy
a certificate from, but can have a crucial impact on the overall
performance of a customer's website.
With its insight into the kind of requests being sent to many
different websites, CloudFlare is well-positioned to identify
malicious traffic and provide protection to all of its customers.
Depending on which level of security is enabled, CloudFlare can deny
requests which are attempting SQL injection attacks, comment spam,
excessive crawling, email harvesting, or exploiting cross-site
scripting vulnerabilities. Business and Enterpriseusers can also
benefit from CloudFlare's advanced DDoS (distributed denial of
service) protection.
CloudFlare's growth accelerated significantly in the summer of last
year. This is when many people first became aware of the service,
after it was used to handle traffic for the Lulz Securitywebsite.
High profile attacks against Sony, Fox, PBS and the X Factor helped
LulzSec garner 350,000 followers on Twitter, where it extolled the
virtues of using CloudFlare to mitigate DDoS attacks.