Matthew Prince, CEO of security firm CloudFlare
While marketing can be a significant portion of any start-up’s budget, most marketers consider word-of-mouth attention a real prize in the marketing mix, for its affordability and its validation of their good work. Recently, security and web optimization firm CloudFlare (www.cloudflare.com) gained the endorsement of a controversial and unusual source.
Several times during the last several weeks, the now-infamous hacking group LulzSec sang CloudFlare’s praises on Twitter to nearly 150,000 followers. And, though CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince says the endorsement hasn’t necessarily resulted in an adoption spike, the past few weeks have catapulted the San Francisco-based company from under the radar to the forefront of security discussion.
LulzSec joins an eclectic group of CloudFlare customers that includes Metallica, LaughingSquid and the national government of Turkey. So how did a tech start-up that launched less than a year ago become a website with more than 150 million unique visitors per month, 5 billion page views each 30 day period and at any given second handles 60,000 requests? Prince says the steady increase in users is thanks to a service that combines security and performance in a single easy-to-use formula, though the LulzSec buzz has helped.
“I think anytime you are able to get people to focus on a security issue to recognize a product that provides a solution then that will increase adoption,” Prince says.
“Obviously if I had my choice of marketing customers to highlight the benefits that CloudFlare brings I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen Lulzsec to do that,” Prince says. “I might have chosen the Turkish government instead. The other day there was an election in Turkey and the official page that had the election results was actually powered by CloudFlare.”
CloudFlare provides security, a CDN-like service, high-level compression and web content optimization.
“As we looked at the market most security solutions targeted those 10,000 largest websites that were out there,” Prince says. “We built something that works for everyone else.”
CloudFlare launched in September 2010 at TechCrunch Disrupt conference. The idea originated from the team at Project Honey Pot, the web community tracking online fraud and abuse. From there, Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn founded CloudFlare to provision security in the cloud.
“What we started to realize is though we started out building a security product the infrastructure we had built involved 12 different data centers scattered all around the world from Singapore to Frankfurt and everywhere in between. This allowed us to provide a real performance boost to websites,” Prince says.
Though Prince wouldn’t specify what services LulzSec uses from CloudFlare, he says that individual websites can decide “how aggressive they want to be about performance.”
Prince says that the nature of the data that CloudFlare has on LulzSec is “pretty transient,” and stresses that CloudFlare isn’t working with the organization in order to endorse any kind of anti-social stance.
“It’s interesting to have public enemy number one using our service but it is important to note that we are not the hosting provider; we’re much more similar to something like a network provider where traffic is passing through us and we’re not actually storing any of the data,” Prince says. “Importantly, if we were to kick them off of our network that wouldn’t take the content off the Internet it would just be a little bit slower.”
“We’re a legitimate, law-abiding organization. We’re not hiding from anyone; our office address is published clearly and we respect the law. If we’re ordered to do something then we would comply with that order.”
As CloudFlare has been building out its network, it has realized its potential as a value-added service for web hosting providers to get more out of existing resources. Prince says HostGator was the first Web host to approach CloudFlare in its beta stage in July, and has since integrated it into its website.
“We’d always planned on working with hosting providers but it was a surprise that a hosting provider of its size would come to us as early,” Prince says.
Though there is no formal hosting partner program in place yet, Prince says it will launch in August.
“While we are still working out the details of what our formal hosting provider program relationships will be over the long term we have a queue of a lot of web hosts working with us in a pilot program in order to understand the needs of the hosting industry,” he says.
Prince says CloudFlare is looking for hosting providers to contribute to what the program will look like.
“Every website online wants to be a little bit faster and a little safer so if you can make that extremely easy and extremely affordable then people are going to rush through your door and that’s what we’ve seen.”
CloudFlare will be at HostingCon 2011 in San Diego, California, in August (where Prince will deliver a presentation on outsourced tools for hosts). If you are looking to attend, registration is currently open.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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Excellent job. keep going!
It’s difficult to find well-informed people about this topic, however, you seem like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks