Cloudflare is a CDN and reverse proxy provider, headquartered in San Francisco, USA. When it was first being developed, Cloudflare was informally called “Project Web Wall.” Its services officially launched on September 27, 2010, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

Website operators can use Cloudflare to add the following services to their site:

  • Content delivery — Cloudflare creates caches of static content from its customers’ websites, which it hosts on its distributed global network of servers. When users visit the website, Cloudflare provides the cached content from a location that is closest to the visitor geographically, improving page load times.
  • DDOS protection — If an attacker tries to shut down a Cloudflare customer’s website using a DDOS attack, Cloudflare can mitigate the disruption. Their technique uses JavaScript challenges, such as captchas, to temporarily require all visitors to prove they are human. Cloudflare has successfully protected against attacks that exceed 300 GB/second of malicious traffic.
  • Domain name service — Cloudflare handles DNS requests for its customers using an anycast network. As of 2022, their DNS response time is among the fastest available on the Internet.

Cloudflare services are used by over 60,000 websites, including:

  • Stack Overflow
  • Yelp
  • Digital Ocean
  • Y Combinator’s Hacker News
  • Medium
  • Upwork
  • Computer Hope

CDN, Internet terms

  • Domain, DNS, ISP, and web host companies and links.
  • The official Cloudflare website.