CloudFlare

CloudFlare, Inc. is a U.S. company that provides a content delivery network and distributed domain name server services, sitting between the visitor and the CloudFlare user’s hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites. Its network protects, speeds up, and improves availability for a website or mobile application with a change in DNS. CloudFlare is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with additional offices in London and Singapore.

History

CloudFlare was created in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn,[3][4] who had previously worked on Project Honey Pot.[4][5] CloudFlare was launched at the September 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt conference.[3][4] It received media attention in June 2011, after providing security to LulzSec’s website.

The hacker group UGNazi attacked CloudFlare partially via flaws in Google’s authentication systems in June 2012, gaining administrative access to CloudFlare and using it to deface 4chan.[7][8]

In February 2014, CloudFlare mitigated the largest-ever recorded DDoS attack, which peaked at 400 Gbit/s against an undisclosed customer.

Matthew Prince is the Co-founder & CEO of CloudFlare, the web performance and security company. Prince wrote his first computer program when he was 7, and hasn’t been able to shake the bug since. After attending the University of Chicago Law School, he worked as an attorney for one day before jumping at the opportunity to be a founding member of a tech startup. He hasn’t looked back. CloudFlare is his third entrepreneurial venture. In 2011, CloudFlare was selected by the Wall Street Journal as the Most Innovative Internet Technology company, and named a 2012 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Today CloudFlare accelerates and protects more than 65 billion page views for more than 550 million unique visitors every month.