Luxury Link, a pioneer in the web-based auction model for luxury travel, was facing the challenge of optimizing their website to ensure visitors get the most out of the experience. Their web property experience includes everything from design to merchandising to site performance to SEO and the conversion funnel. These core fundamentals really matter to Luxury Link: performance, SEO, business intelligence, merchandising and seasonal relevance. They were also looking for a better CDN solution when their current contract was up.

Buzzlie.com, a popular content site that generates viral content in the celebrity, fashion, and entertainment world, experienced a rapid rise in popularity. However, with this fame came a downside - the site became a target of notorious DDoS attacks. Initially, the company's Co-founder and CTO, Steve Flee, was able to handle the early DDoS attacks on his own. However, as the attacks escalated, the company needed a more robust solution for DDoS protection. They also wanted to expand their user base in Australia, but setting up a data center there was not cost-effective.

Yola, a website creation and hosting platform, was looking for ways to offer Universal SSL to all the web properties on their network. They had already implemented DDoS protection, a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and managed DNS capabilities to deliver a world-class service. However, they were looking to consolidate multiple vendor contracts and roll out Universal SSL while doing so. The challenge was to find a single-vendor solution that could meet all their needs, including Universal SSL, DDoS protection, CDN, and DNS. Additionally, they had to migrate their substantial user base to the new platform, which was a significant challenge.

OkCupid, a popular online dating site, was looking for a solution to shield its website from online threats and to ensure strong security and high availability for its growing user base. The company needed a solution that could handle its large volume of traffic and provide robust security protection. Additionally, OkCupid wanted to improve its page load times, particularly for its users in the United States and the United Kingdom.

ShoppingCartElite.com, a full business suite for running an online business, was facing challenges with web performance, security, and SSL needs as it grew. The company was only offering shared SSL, which was not a long-term solution for its customers. During their search for a solution, they suffered a major DoS attack that affected their entire clientele. This situation prompted them to test Cloudflare's service across hundreds of their client's websites.

As Discord prepared for rapid growth, they needed a way to affordably and quickly scale their existing hardware infrastructure, while maintaining performance and security. Performance wise, Discord would need to transition from serving their content from a single homed server to a high performing CDN (Content Delivery Network) partner that could serve their static assets from all around the globe. Security wise, Discord needed to protect their websockets-based traffic from the rampant DDoS attacks that they were experiencing. As CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy explained, “Since we are a gamer focused product we attract a lot of users who love to DDoS each other during game matches. As we grew more popular the intensity and occurrences of these DDoS attacks increased to the point where our engineers were constantly dealing with them.” Vishnevskiy continued, “Before Cloudflare, we were using a large number of HAProxy boxes with DNS load balancing to be able to failover during DDoS attacks on our real-time gateways.” However, their initial hardware solution could cost Discord up to six figures annually at scale and would still require work from Discord’s engineers.

CodeGuard, a service that provides backup and protection for websites, was looking for ways to expand its user base and improve its product. The company wanted to reach out to website owners who were interested in securing their sites. However, reaching out to this audience and getting their feedback for product improvement was a challenge.

Christmas.com, a site dedicated to sharing the joy of Christmas, was hit by several large DDoS attacks in early December, their busiest time of the year. The attacks knocked the site offline, disrupting their services and affecting their customers. The site needed a solution to shield them from the attacks and keep their services running smoothly.

Pixowl, a mobile game studio, was facing a challenge in delivering smooth gameplay to its users. The mobile gaming industry is highly competitive and requires excellence in execution. One of the key factors in this execution is the game's overall performance, including the speed of loading its contents and the refresh time. In the mobile gaming industry, there is a player drop-rate of 20-40% for games if initial load times are over a minute long. Pixowl's game content, which is cloud-hosted by Digital Ocean, needed to be delivered as fast as possible to their players. However, Pixowl is a lean, indie gaming studio, and their focus is on making great, fun, compelling games for their target audience of kids and families, not to develop complex backend technical solutions to deliver their content. Thus, Pixowl’s challenge was to globally scale without distracting their engineers trying to develop games and avoiding internal headaches.

In 2015, AO began their expansion into Germany and the Netherlands. While the logistical effort of delivering products in these new markets was a challenge, they also faced increased pressure to ensure that their website would perform optimally for customers in these regions. AO implemented a well known content delivery network (CDN) to improve site performance across all of their web domains, and to reduce their overall infrastructure costs. While the onboarding process and support was straightforward, it wasn’t until they began routing more traffic to the provider’s edge network that they started experiencing some new unforeseen challenges. They were hit with some very high unexpected charges as a result, and this made them question the overall investment return of this solution. They also experienced an outage around this time, and had issues getting their case sufficiently escalated. These events forced AO to begin exploring alternatives for a solution that would be more cost-effective and support over the long term.

Carousell serves around 1 PB of images per month and utilizes artificial intelligence to create a frictionless user experience for anyone looking to buy or sell items on their platform. In order to meet intensive performance requirements for a rapidly expanding regional customer base, they need a cloud provider that can ensure uptime during high-traffic events and cache dynamic pages on an as-needed basis. These issues come into sharp focus during Carousell’s periodic “flash sales” — a recurring limited-time event when they partner with sellers to provide deep discounts for buyers. Just one of these flash sales can attract over 3x the amount of traffic Carousell typically sees. It isn’t an easy task, especially as the rapid influx of traffic during flash sales places a significant strain on the platform. Initially, Carousell turned to Amazon CloudFront to keep their site running smoothly, but soon found that they were not able to handle the site’s growing audience and performance needs.

Udacity, an online education company, aimed to penetrate the rapidly growing education market in China. However, they faced challenges due to strict internet regulations by the Chinese government and slow internet connections throughout the country. Their US-based content was difficult to access for Chinese customers, leading to frustration and potential loss of customers. The main issue was that the loading of assets from their classroom, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), would take several minutes due to throttling of AWS CloudFront nodes to as little as 20Kbps.

During the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest semi final, the busiest time of year for the website, Eurovision.tv was targeted with a large DDoS attack. Their content delivery network provider at that time could only do very little to mitigate the attack, and because they were using a CDN, their hosting partner couldn’t do much filtering either. The first flood of attack traffic was mitigated with some blocking techniques implemented by their CDN, but when the attack got more creative there was nothing more they could do. During the first semi-final, fans of the Eurovision Song Contest access the website to find out results and to watch online streams of the contest. With the site service disrupting, visitors from around the world to Eurovision.tv experienced difficulty accessing these results and streams.

Taringa!, the largest user-generated content platform in Latin America, was experiencing exponential growth with a user base expanding across Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, and the US Hispanic community. As the user base continued to grow, Taringa! executives were looking for a way to ensure a fast and reliable online experience. They needed a performance and security company that was aggressively expanding their network in countries where most of their users live.

BharatPe, a merchant payment processing company, was under constant cyberattacks from the moment it launched. The company was targeted with SQL injections and brute force attacks, which impeded its ability to scale effectively. The company's engineers were constantly pulled into time-intensive security projects, such as identifying their attackers' IPs, a task that took nearly three months. As a result, other important projects had to be put on hold. The attacks also risked the trust of their customers, which is crucial for a company in the payment business.

In December 2016, orderbird faced a heavy distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that nearly took the company out of business. This was a serious problem even by the standards of many business-critical applications. Network connectivity and backend availability were essential parts of the overall POS system, and if it happened to go down for any reason, their customers’ businesses could not receive orders and may have then lost revenue.

The Bay Lights were officially unveiled on March 5, 2013. Brian VanderZanden, Lead Developer at WPI, knew there would be a surge in traffic to TheBayLights.org leading up to that day, and most likely a huge surge in traffic on the day of the unveiling. WPI has many sites on Cloudflare, including TheBayLights.org. He reached out to Cloudflare to make sure the site was ready to handle the increase in traffic. Cloudflare suggested a few small optimizations (minification, an image that wasn’t proxied because on a “grey cloud” DNS record), one useful reminder (white-list the Cloudflare IPs), and a powerful recommendation: Cache Everything.

The San Francisco Marathon is a popular race that attracts 24,000 runners from all over the globe. The website is crucial for registration, organization during the event weekend, and tracking each runner's race time. However, during the race weekend, the website experiences a 400% increase in traffic. The previous year, the servers failed due to the heavy traffic, leading to disgruntled racers. The challenge was to optimize the website for heavy load and prevent server failure.

LearnThat Foundation was facing a challenge with their website, LearnThat.org. Despite successfully driving traffic to the site, they were struggling to keep visitors engaged. The time spent by visitors on the site was low, indicating a lack of engagement and potentially leading to missed opportunities for the foundation. The foundation had heard about Cloudflare at a local meet-up and decided to sign up, hoping to improve the performance of their site and increase visitor engagement.

FounderLY, a media project that showcases entrepreneurs’ stories, prioritizes the design of its website. The platform is image-heavy and uses CSS and JavaScript, which can slow down the website's loading speed. This is a concern as they want to deliver a fast and seamless experience for their readers worldwide. Additionally, the website serves a lot of videos, and while the videos are not handled by Cloudflare, ensuring the rest of the page loads quickly is crucial to keep visitors on the website while they wait for the videos to start. As a startup, FounderLY needed a cost-effective solution to boost their website performance without spending a fortune. They were also under a tight deadline with limited engineering resources.

Zendesk, a company that provides a customer service platform, experienced significant growth over the years. This growth presented unique challenges in terms of managing and scaling the company. They needed a solution that could enhance their website's performance, deliver content quickly regardless of the visitor's location, protect them from web threats, and optimize their front and back-end systems. The solution needed to be scalable to support Zendesk's rapid growth.

DigitalOcean, the third largest cloud provider on the planet, was facing a potential threat of malicious attacks targeting DNS servers. With a vast number of developers relying on DigitalOcean to serve their content, the company needed to ensure that their DNS resolutions were fast and always online anywhere in the world. Despite not having experienced a DDoS attack, DigitalOcean sought a proactive solution to ensure the security of their DNS infrastructure against such attacks in the future.

Montecito Bank & Trust (MB&T) was in the midst of a complex regulatory discussion that would transition the bank’s website from https:// www.montecito.com to a new domain https://montecito.bank. The .bank extension would incorporate the latest security requirements to reduce phishing, spoofing, and internet scams. In addition, Paul Abramson, Director of Technology at MB&T, recognized the risks a potential security attack could pose to a bank’s website. He needed a vendor to help him meet the industry regulations for the domain change as well as bulletproof the site from sophisticated cyber security threats.

Spark::red, a service provider for top-tier web properties, understands the high expectations of its e-commerce customers when it comes to website speed and security. Performance and security features are absolutely critical for online businesses. Sites need to load fast, and customers need to know that their personal information (emails, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) is protected. A shining example of the challenges faced by Spark::red’s clients is Calendars.com—an internet top 500 retailer. In the past, Calendars.com suffered from multiple site outages due to traffic spikes on Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays as well as during other peak periods.

Quizlet, a popular online learning service in the United States, was facing challenges with DDoS attacks on their site, preventing students from accessing study material. As the site grew in popularity, it became a more visible target for bad actors. Furthermore, Quizlet was serving traffic out of a single region in the US, which was limiting its ability to quickly serve content to a global student base. In order to make its learning tools readily available to the world, Quizlet needed a way to both protect its website from the increase in DDoS attacks, while simultaneously distributing its content internationally with high performance.

Creare Group, a leading digital marketing agency for small to medium businesses in the UK, was in the process of revamping its server security. They were looking for a solution that could not only improve their security but also boost the SEO rankings of their clients' websites. The company was hit by a DDOS attack during the relaunch of its brand and site at a high-profile event. The attack was so strong that it was able to take down the dedicated server that solely hosted the site. Additionally, Creare wanted to deliver rapid load speeds to its clients in the UK and around the world, and improve the load speed of highly dynamic Magento e-commerce sites.

Zopim, a cloud-based live chat platform, was facing a significant challenge in meeting the demands of its customers. The customers wanted their websites to load instantaneously, as speed forms a critical part of the user experience. However, Zopim was having a hard time meeting this demand. The widget loading time was extremely important to Zopim’s customers, and the company was struggling to ensure that everything on their website loaded quickly and efficiently.

Dan Baritchi, co-founder and CEO of BlogPress, along with his wife Jennifer, have their own successful blog and were interested in sharing their knowledge with other would-be bloggers. Once they created the theblogpress.com they were in need of added performance benefits and solutions.

Handelsblatt Media Group (HMG), a leading media house for business and financial information in Germany, was facing significant challenges with online attacks from hostile actors. These attacks were causing major issues, including overwhelming HMG's origin server multiple times over several weeks, rendering the site inaccessible. This was eroding the trust of their readers and causing erratic website reliability. With no signs of the attacks abating, HMG needed to find a solution that could not only mitigate these hostile attacks but also provide benefits to performance, reliability, operational efficiency, and cost.

Hostnet Brazil, one of the top web hosts in Brazil, was facing increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats, ranging from excessive bot crawling to distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). The company was looking for a solution that could provide a more resilient hosting environment. They were previously using Amazon’s CloudFront, but they needed a solution that could offer integrated performance and security solutions to protect their platform and make it future-proof.