13 ms·

Cloudflare Raises $150M and Adds to Board of Directors

213 points by migueldemoura 8y ago

diafygi 8y ago
Doesn't raising this kind of money scream that you're eventually going to start to monetize the data flowing through your network (e.g. telecoms selling location data to bounty hunters)?
- jgrahamc 8y ago
  No. To go into more detail: no. We make our money by selling our service to our customers.
  - numbsafari 8y ago
    So does Comcast.
  - adventured 8y ago
    While you're on this thread... some quick feedback. I'm a fan of your registrar service. I started experimenting with it not long ago and have begun moving most of my domains over. I understand it's still early days there. Any chance you could build up & clean up the billing reporting and controls for domains (separating it out better, making it easier to view just domain billing information & renewal info)? It's a bit haphazard currently. It would also be very nice to be able to register domains further out than a year (right now it's just a basic one year autorenewal on/off) - even if that offering cost extra per year to push the duration out. I'd guess the issue on wholesaling and allowing longer renewals, is that if the price goes up on you in the meantime, you can't pass that along (no buffer / profit margin built-in); so throw a reasonable fee on top for pushing the renewal out. As it is, I've been adding years on my existing registrar, before I move domains over to Cloudflare. Why do I want the longer duration? Peace of mind, instead of renewing every year. Not having to worry about domains expiring is a mental positive.
    - jgrahamc 8y ago
      Yep. I understand. Billing has been a frustration around Cloudflare Registrar. We are working on it. Stay tuned and sorry for the frustrations.
  - m463 8y ago
    Your customers might pay to identify the people sitting at the browsers pulling down your data. A CDN is the ultimate unblockable cookie that could correlate everything else.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  I think Cloudflare can still do plenty for their core paying customer base. You see less and less features making it to the free plan (mostly because there would be too much cost associated with giving it out for free). Some stuff I'm just not sure why it's not on a free plan, or even just on an Enterprise plan. I'd love to be able to send a custom 502 for instance, but instead I just remap it to 500 in nginx now... because my choice is between customization or sending the semantically correct status code. (Hey I know you browse HN CF staff, I'd drop $20 in a heartbeat to get stuff like this that's low cost to you across my account) Argo is really cool, but enabling it on my Mastodon instance would add about $200 for traffic to my bill...
  - prdonahue 8y ago
    Mind elaborating on "stuff like this"? I'm all ears (eyes): pat at cloudflare.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Aren't they more of a cloud services business model like AWS?
- eloff 8y ago
  Cloudflare generates their revenue through their paid plans and enterprise customers. I think the selling location data to the bounty hunter market against the terms of their privacy policy is rather a bit small of a market opportunity to be worth it to any rational actor...
  - simongr3dal 8y ago
    But we have already seen it happen with the telecoms, so while they may not be "rational actors" clearly it's not too small a market oportunity to be worth it for some spineless businesses. Telecoms also generate their revenue by just keeping the power turned on with their existing infrastructure (yes it does require maintenance and monitoring), but that didn't stop them from trying to find additional revenue streams by further exploiting their already paying costumers. I do use Cloudflare on their free tier, and I don't think they are spying on everyone and selling ads against some profile they have built up. We'll just have to be vigilant because the status quo right now is to be big brother and sell targeted advertising.
    - avidal 8y ago
      I've been at Cloudflare just over a year now, and if there's one message that's been drilled into my head it's Trust. We understand that we're in the position that we're in largely due to trust. I like to believe that even if our CEO is a secret lizard person you'd get whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork if we tried to exploit our users.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - zackbloom 8y ago
        Interesting idea: employee canaries. You have a way to follow 1-5 employees of a company you think are honest. If they quit, you get a message.
- bovermyer 8y ago
  There's no reason to believe that Cloudflare, a company whose profits come from selling an _actual service_, would do this. I would strongly suggest that you reconsider your choice of metallic headgear.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    While I do think CloudFlare has earned quite a bit of trust in this regard, this is a bit of a silly argument. Cell carriers have been selling location data, despite making plenty of profit off selling a service. It's quite clear "we could be making more money" is a (potentially) compelling argument for large organizations sitting on lots of consumer data.
    - bovermyer 8y ago
      OK, fair point.
    - jerf 8y ago
      You want to look at the comparative money made selling the service vs. selling the data or other secondary data streams. Cell phone companies sell the data because they are able to make quantities of money somewhat comparable to their profit from the service. Places like Google sell the data (or advertising-based access to the data, which isn't exactly the same, but from this perspective is close enough) because that's their primary revenue stream. But a place that is making a healthy profit on customers, and have no way to monetize a secondary stream at anywhere near the same amount of profit, have several incentives to not to deal with it. One is something that a lot of people have trouble wrapping their mind around, but as a business grows, it gets to a point where it isn't necessarily worth grabbing every penny, because while the business is exerting the effort to grab that penny it's missing a dollar. (This is one of the reasons why there's no chance that Google will simply one day be the entire software industry, or why Amazon still has parters in AWS providing services that you'd think Amazon could just provide.) Another is the risk of exposure or pissing off your profitable customers when they find out about your secondary monetization; if 98% of your possible profit is the business profit and 2% the secondary monetization, then it doesn't take much perceived risk before that's a bad plan. (One of the reasons not to get too upset when some companies make a decent profit; it helps keep them from scrabbling about for ways to extract every last penny from you, which is when they start getting really destructive. You're often better off when companies are not motivated to do that, rather than trying to starve them too hard. I really wish Google and Facebook had found more productive ways to make a profit; we'd all be better off for it.)
sascha_sl 8y ago
I'd rather see some serious competition for Cloudflare to be honest. They're slowly becoming the best and only choice. Competitors exist (like Incapsula) but they're usually just not that good.
- flurdy 8y ago
  Fastly? Akamai? Pretty good competition. [1] https://www.fastly.com https://www.fastly.com [2] https://www.akamai.com https://www.akamai.com
  - sascha_sl 8y ago
    Do they have a WAF? Fastly seems to have one in limited availability at least...
    - flurdy 8y ago
      * https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp * https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-application-firewall https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-applicati... Not saying they are better than Cloudflare. I use Cloudflare myself. But they are good alternatives.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - cbg0 8y ago
    > Pretty good competition. Not when it comes to pricing.
    - ForgotMyUName 8y ago
      Both have better networks and features though. Sometimes you get what you pay for. Cloudflare is the Heroku of the CDN space. They are easy to setup, they give away free or cheap accounts to get people on their service. Once a company gets big and starts having real traffic they move off of Cloudflare to a better provider. Akamai isn't competing with Cloudflare on price, much like The French Laundry isn't competing with McDonalds on price.
lallysingh 8y ago
... so, what's the money for? I assume they're already profitable...
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Investing so you can make more money? Even Microsoft has raised money to be reinvested, and they've been profitable for decades. https://thinkgrowth.org/why-you-should-raise-money-when-you-dont-need-to-365df0ad867d https://thinkgrowth.org/why-you-should-raise-money-when-you-...
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    Well yeah, I figured that they wanted to spend the money on something for their business to make /more/ profit. But what? Edit: (at least) part of the answer is listed by jasoncartwright above.
    - giancarlostoro 8y ago
      I'm just speculating but cloud hosting might be their next big leap if they go that route? They've already got a domain registrar and other interesting services.
      - jgrahamc 8y ago
        I doubt that. But we do have a very large network that keeps expanding and expanding...
        giancarlostoro 8y ago
        Maybe not yet, but I could see you guys going that route. Digital Ocean used to only be VPS' now they've got plenty of other offerings. You're still in a good business regardless.
      - zackbloom 8y ago
        Cloudflare does have a form of hosting: https://workers.dev https://workers.dev
nabla9 8y ago
According to the news Cloudflare was planning $3.5 billion IPO this year. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cloudflare-ipo/web-performance-software-company-cloudflare-readies-ipo-sources-idUSKCN1MX2SI https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cloudflare-ipo/web-perfor...
- lhorak 8y ago
  Well let's see about that. I've heard about companies "planning" IPOs...
orliesaurus 8y ago
Meanwhile I am still waiting for a free tier on the serverless workers [1] stuff they've been advertising whole of the last year. There is no real reason in paying $5/month for 10M requests when you can't even get accustomed or do a proof of concept beforehand. [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/how-workers-work/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/how-workers-...
- Aissen 8y ago
  Is the cost of $5/month really that high for a trial ?
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    It is, when I don't know what I'm buying. Sure, I can modify my response in-flight using a worker, but how exactly? What can I do with it? It wouldn't be a big deal if I wanted to evaluate it for my company, we'd just pay the negligible fee and be done with it, but when my weekend sideproject's marginal cost goes from $0/mo to $5/mo, that's a barrier to entry I will never overcome. It's not about the $5, it's that there's very little incentive to pay it when the app is making no money.
    - orliesaurus 8y ago
      Exactly, I should have explained like you did to prevent the downvotes! Thanks for "reading my mind" on this one
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        No problem, I have exactly the same issue, and sure, Cloudflare can say "we aren't interested in the cheapskate market", but every technology I've introduced in my job where we pay tens of thousands per year for is one I was familiar with because they had a free tier.
    - RReverser 8y ago
      Not sure if someone else mentioned it already, but you actually can play with it for free on https://cloudflareworkers.com/ https://cloudflareworkers.com/. Sure, it's a limited version without binding to a specific domain and, correspondingly, without APIs to control Cloudflare-specific features, but it's often sufficient for POC transformations.
auslander 8y ago
Found a CDN comparison page with a repo on github. Strange no Cloudflare in the table. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367675
- snek 8y ago
  Perhaps this is because CF doesn't actually provide a location to host random files. When people say CF is a CDN, they're talking about its caches. You still need your own server. (although they seem to be pushing dedicated workers @ https://workers.dev https://workers.dev)
  - judge2020 8y ago
    FYI that workers are already available, they just currently require a domain on CF https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-workers/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-workers/
krn 8y ago
CDNPerf[1] provides a real-time performance analysis of all major CDN providers. I have researched this space a lot, and my conclusions are: - Cloudflare: the best all-in-one solution, as long as you don't go above the Business tier - Fastly: the most technically advanced CDN, but also one of the most expensive ones (there is a reason why StackExchange and Reddit moved from Cloudflare to Fastly) - KeyCDN: the best fully-featured value-for-money CDN, if you just want to replace AWS Cloudfront CDN / Google Cloud CDN / Azure CDN - BunnyCDN: the best value-for-money CDN for distributing large static assets across the globe (can get as low as $0.0025 / GB) [1] https://www.cdnperf.com/ https://www.cdnperf.com/
- mises 8y ago
  Thank you for not making us read a blog post to learn this. I appreciate the information.
- daper 8y ago
  CDNPerf and DNSPerf services most likely do testing from some pool of VPSes or hosting services, although I can't see such details in their description. If you are interested how your service performs when serving to other servers, you can use it. If you are interested how it performs when serving to real people (home, mobile, offices), I wouldn't trust it. Your comparison is missing Akamai which is probably the most feature-rich and largest CDN.
  - krn 8y ago
    I see CDNPerf and DNSPerf as a way to compare the providers relatively to each other, not as a trustworthy tool go get the real indications of time. I skipped Akamai, because it seems to be from the period of time, where the number of points of presence (PoPs) was used as the best indicator of the quality of a CDN. It might still be true in some of the third-world countries, but it's no longer the case in the developed world[1]. As for DNS providers: NS1 is like Fastly (the most advanced / premium), Rage4 is like KeyCDN (the best fully-featured value-for-money), and ClouDNS is like BunnyCDN (the best high-volume value-for-money). And Cloudflare is still Cloudflare. [1] https://www.fastly.com/blog/why-having-more-pops-isnt-always-better/ https://www.fastly.com/blog/why-having-more-pops-isnt-always...
aboutruby 8y ago
> Mar 12, 2019 - Series E - $150M > Sep 22, 2015 - Series D - $110M > Dec 17, 2013 - Series C - $50M > Jul 12, 2011 - Series B - $20M > Nov 25, 2009 - Series A - $2.1M > Jun 1, 2009 - Non Equity Assistance - ? Seems like their rounds of fundings are slowing down. There were also rumors of a $3.5B IPO. I wonder if the founders still have a majority stake in the company. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudflare https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudflare
- lquist 8y ago
  Many startups that raised in 2015 did so at very high valuations and either never were able to raise again or took some time to meet the lofty expectations set by 2015 prices
shok3001 8y ago
Ironically this page timed out when I clicked the link.
partiallypro 8y ago
I'm still waiting on this "Bandwidth Alliance" pricing. I'm on Azure and have seen no downtick in my bandwidth bill, though we use Cloudflare pretty much exclusively.
throwaway309098 8y ago
ex-cloudflarer: Cloudflare is undergoing a lot of big projects to break away from the image that they are "just a CDN". Raising a round now instead of going public allows them to invest more on those projects instead of focusing on quarter to quarter results. Also, avoiding brain-drains post-IPO while they need those talents the most. Raising another round also allows them to have a higher per-share value which helps hiring. It's been a long time since the last round and the real value of Cloudflare's stock offers was higher than what the last funding round would suggest. Now it's easier to point to this round rather than just give vague promises. I do wonder how people feel about this internally though. There's a lot of expectation that the company would go public this year (and some even expected it would go public last year). Hopefully no one needs the money they put in to early exercise any time soon!
Lorin 8y ago
Wish they would fix integrations with 3rd party hosts - Dreamhost integration has been broken for over 5 years.

213 points by migueldemoura 8y ago

Doesn't raising this kind of money scream that you're eventually going to start to monetize the data flowing through your network (e.g. telecoms selling location data to bounty hunters)?

jgrahamc 8y ago
No. To go into more detail: no. We make our money by selling our service to our customers.
- numbsafari 8y ago
  So does Comcast.
- adventured 8y ago
  While you're on this thread... some quick feedback. I'm a fan of your registrar service. I started experimenting with it not long ago and have begun moving most of my domains over. I understand it's still early days there. Any chance you could build up & clean up the billing reporting and controls for domains (separating it out better, making it easier to view just domain billing information & renewal info)? It's a bit haphazard currently. It would also be very nice to be able to register domains further out than a year (right now it's just a basic one year autorenewal on/off) - even if that offering cost extra per year to push the duration out. I'd guess the issue on wholesaling and allowing longer renewals, is that if the price goes up on you in the meantime, you can't pass that along (no buffer / profit margin built-in); so throw a reasonable fee on top for pushing the renewal out. As it is, I've been adding years on my existing registrar, before I move domains over to Cloudflare. Why do I want the longer duration? Peace of mind, instead of renewing every year. Not having to worry about domains expiring is a mental positive.
  - jgrahamc 8y ago
    Yep. I understand. Billing has been a frustration around Cloudflare Registrar. We are working on it. Stay tuned and sorry for the frustrations.
- m463 8y ago
  Your customers might pay to identify the people sitting at the browsers pulling down your data. A CDN is the ultimate unblockable cookie that could correlate everything else.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sascha_sl 8y ago
I think Cloudflare can still do plenty for their core paying customer base. You see less and less features making it to the free plan (mostly because there would be too much cost associated with giving it out for free). Some stuff I'm just not sure why it's not on a free plan, or even just on an Enterprise plan. I'd love to be able to send a custom 502 for instance, but instead I just remap it to 500 in nginx now... because my choice is between customization or sending the semantically correct status code. (Hey I know you browse HN CF staff, I'd drop $20 in a heartbeat to get stuff like this that's low cost to you across my account) Argo is really cool, but enabling it on my Mastodon instance would add about $200 for traffic to my bill...
- prdonahue 8y ago
  Mind elaborating on "stuff like this"? I'm all ears (eyes): pat at cloudflare.
chrisco255 8y ago
Aren't they more of a cloud services business model like AWS?
eloff 8y ago
Cloudflare generates their revenue through their paid plans and enterprise customers. I think the selling location data to the bounty hunter market against the terms of their privacy policy is rather a bit small of a market opportunity to be worth it to any rational actor...
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  But we have already seen it happen with the telecoms, so while they may not be "rational actors" clearly it's not too small a market oportunity to be worth it for some spineless businesses. Telecoms also generate their revenue by just keeping the power turned on with their existing infrastructure (yes it does require maintenance and monitoring), but that didn't stop them from trying to find additional revenue streams by further exploiting their already paying costumers. I do use Cloudflare on their free tier, and I don't think they are spying on everyone and selling ads against some profile they have built up. We'll just have to be vigilant because the status quo right now is to be big brother and sell targeted advertising.
  - avidal 8y ago
    I've been at Cloudflare just over a year now, and if there's one message that's been drilled into my head it's Trust. We understand that we're in the position that we're in largely due to trust. I like to believe that even if our CEO is a secret lizard person you'd get whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork if we tried to exploit our users.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - zackbloom 8y ago
      Interesting idea: employee canaries. You have a way to follow 1-5 employees of a company you think are honest. If they quit, you get a message.
bovermyer 8y ago
There's no reason to believe that Cloudflare, a company whose profits come from selling an _actual service_, would do this. I would strongly suggest that you reconsider your choice of metallic headgear.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  While I do think CloudFlare has earned quite a bit of trust in this regard, this is a bit of a silly argument. Cell carriers have been selling location data, despite making plenty of profit off selling a service. It's quite clear "we could be making more money" is a (potentially) compelling argument for large organizations sitting on lots of consumer data.
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    OK, fair point.
  - jerf 8y ago
    You want to look at the comparative money made selling the service vs. selling the data or other secondary data streams. Cell phone companies sell the data because they are able to make quantities of money somewhat comparable to their profit from the service. Places like Google sell the data (or advertising-based access to the data, which isn't exactly the same, but from this perspective is close enough) because that's their primary revenue stream. But a place that is making a healthy profit on customers, and have no way to monetize a secondary stream at anywhere near the same amount of profit, have several incentives to not to deal with it. One is something that a lot of people have trouble wrapping their mind around, but as a business grows, it gets to a point where it isn't necessarily worth grabbing every penny, because while the business is exerting the effort to grab that penny it's missing a dollar. (This is one of the reasons why there's no chance that Google will simply one day be the entire software industry, or why Amazon still has parters in AWS providing services that you'd think Amazon could just provide.) Another is the risk of exposure or pissing off your profitable customers when they find out about your secondary monetization; if 98% of your possible profit is the business profit and 2% the secondary monetization, then it doesn't take much perceived risk before that's a bad plan. (One of the reasons not to get too upset when some companies make a decent profit; it helps keep them from scrabbling about for ways to extract every last penny from you, which is when they start getting really destructive. You're often better off when companies are not motivated to do that, rather than trying to starve them too hard. I really wish Google and Facebook had found more productive ways to make a profit; we'd all be better off for it.)

sascha_sl 8y ago

I'd rather see some serious competition for Cloudflare to be honest. They're slowly becoming the best and only choice. Competitors exist (like Incapsula) but they're usually just not that good.

flurdy 8y ago
Fastly? Akamai? Pretty good competition. [1] https://www.fastly.com https://www.fastly.com [2] https://www.akamai.com https://www.akamai.com
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  Do they have a WAF? Fastly seems to have one in limited availability at least...
  - flurdy 8y ago
    * https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp * https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-application-firewall https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-applicati... Not saying they are better than Cloudflare. I use Cloudflare myself. But they are good alternatives.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- cbg0 8y ago
  > Pretty good competition. Not when it comes to pricing.
  - ForgotMyUName 8y ago
    Both have better networks and features though. Sometimes you get what you pay for. Cloudflare is the Heroku of the CDN space. They are easy to setup, they give away free or cheap accounts to get people on their service. Once a company gets big and starts having real traffic they move off of Cloudflare to a better provider. Akamai isn't competing with Cloudflare on price, much like The French Laundry isn't competing with McDonalds on price.

lallysingh 8y ago

... so, what's the money for? I assume they're already profitable...

giancarlostoro 8y ago
Investing so you can make more money? Even Microsoft has raised money to be reinvested, and they've been profitable for decades. https://thinkgrowth.org/why-you-should-raise-money-when-you-dont-need-to-365df0ad867d https://thinkgrowth.org/why-you-should-raise-money-when-you-...
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Well yeah, I figured that they wanted to spend the money on something for their business to make /more/ profit. But what? Edit: (at least) part of the answer is listed by jasoncartwright above.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    I'm just speculating but cloud hosting might be their next big leap if they go that route? They've already got a domain registrar and other interesting services.
    - jgrahamc 8y ago
      I doubt that. But we do have a very large network that keeps expanding and expanding...
      - giancarlostoro 8y ago
        Maybe not yet, but I could see you guys going that route. Digital Ocean used to only be VPS' now they've got plenty of other offerings. You're still in a good business regardless.
    - zackbloom 8y ago
      Cloudflare does have a form of hosting: https://workers.dev https://workers.dev

nabla9 8y ago

According to the news Cloudflare was planning $3.5 billion IPO this year. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cloudflare-ipo/web-performance-software-company-cloudflare-readies-ipo-sources-idUSKCN1MX2SI https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cloudflare-ipo/web-perfor...

lhorak 8y ago
Well let's see about that. I've heard about companies "planning" IPOs...

orliesaurus 8y ago

Meanwhile I am still waiting for a free tier on the serverless workers [1] stuff they've been advertising whole of the last year. There is no real reason in paying $5/month for 10M requests when you can't even get accustomed or do a proof of concept beforehand. [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/how-workers-work/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/how-workers-...

Aissen 8y ago
Is the cost of $5/month really that high for a trial ?
- StavrosK 8y ago
  It is, when I don't know what I'm buying. Sure, I can modify my response in-flight using a worker, but how exactly? What can I do with it? It wouldn't be a big deal if I wanted to evaluate it for my company, we'd just pay the negligible fee and be done with it, but when my weekend sideproject's marginal cost goes from $0/mo to $5/mo, that's a barrier to entry I will never overcome. It's not about the $5, it's that there's very little incentive to pay it when the app is making no money.
  - orliesaurus 8y ago
    Exactly, I should have explained like you did to prevent the downvotes! Thanks for "reading my mind" on this one
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      No problem, I have exactly the same issue, and sure, Cloudflare can say "we aren't interested in the cheapskate market", but every technology I've introduced in my job where we pay tens of thousands per year for is one I was familiar with because they had a free tier.
  - RReverser 8y ago
    Not sure if someone else mentioned it already, but you actually can play with it for free on https://cloudflareworkers.com/ https://cloudflareworkers.com/. Sure, it's a limited version without binding to a specific domain and, correspondingly, without APIs to control Cloudflare-specific features, but it's often sufficient for POC transformations.

auslander 8y ago

Found a CDN comparison page with a repo on github. Strange no Cloudflare in the table. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367675

snek 8y ago
Perhaps this is because CF doesn't actually provide a location to host random files. When people say CF is a CDN, they're talking about its caches. You still need your own server. (although they seem to be pushing dedicated workers @ https://workers.dev https://workers.dev)
- judge2020 8y ago
  FYI that workers are already available, they just currently require a domain on CF https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-workers/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-workers/

krn 8y ago

CDNPerf[1] provides a real-time performance analysis of all major CDN providers. I have researched this space a lot, and my conclusions are: - Cloudflare: the best all-in-one solution, as long as you don't go above the Business tier - Fastly: the most technically advanced CDN, but also one of the most expensive ones (there is a reason why StackExchange and Reddit moved from Cloudflare to Fastly) - KeyCDN: the best fully-featured value-for-money CDN, if you just want to replace AWS Cloudfront CDN / Google Cloud CDN / Azure CDN - BunnyCDN: the best value-for-money CDN for distributing large static assets across the globe (can get as low as $0.0025 / GB) [1] https://www.cdnperf.com/ https://www.cdnperf.com/

mises 8y ago
Thank you for not making us read a blog post to learn this. I appreciate the information.
daper 8y ago
CDNPerf and DNSPerf services most likely do testing from some pool of VPSes or hosting services, although I can't see such details in their description. If you are interested how your service performs when serving to other servers, you can use it. If you are interested how it performs when serving to real people (home, mobile, offices), I wouldn't trust it. Your comparison is missing Akamai which is probably the most feature-rich and largest CDN.
- krn 8y ago
  I see CDNPerf and DNSPerf as a way to compare the providers relatively to each other, not as a trustworthy tool go get the real indications of time. I skipped Akamai, because it seems to be from the period of time, where the number of points of presence (PoPs) was used as the best indicator of the quality of a CDN. It might still be true in some of the third-world countries, but it's no longer the case in the developed world[1]. As for DNS providers: NS1 is like Fastly (the most advanced / premium), Rage4 is like KeyCDN (the best fully-featured value-for-money), and ClouDNS is like BunnyCDN (the best high-volume value-for-money). And Cloudflare is still Cloudflare. [1] https://www.fastly.com/blog/why-having-more-pops-isnt-always-better/ https://www.fastly.com/blog/why-having-more-pops-isnt-always...

aboutruby 8y ago

> Mar 12, 2019 - Series E - $150M > Sep 22, 2015 - Series D - $110M > Dec 17, 2013 - Series C - $50M > Jul 12, 2011 - Series B - $20M > Nov 25, 2009 - Series A - $2.1M > Jun 1, 2009 - Non Equity Assistance - ? Seems like their rounds of fundings are slowing down. There were also rumors of a $3.5B IPO. I wonder if the founders still have a majority stake in the company. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudflare https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudflare

lquist 8y ago
Many startups that raised in 2015 did so at very high valuations and either never were able to raise again or took some time to meet the lofty expectations set by 2015 prices

shok3001 8y ago

Ironically this page timed out when I clicked the link.

partiallypro 8y ago

I'm still waiting on this "Bandwidth Alliance" pricing. I'm on Azure and have seen no downtick in my bandwidth bill, though we use Cloudflare pretty much exclusively.

throwaway309098 8y ago

ex-cloudflarer: Cloudflare is undergoing a lot of big projects to break away from the image that they are "just a CDN". Raising a round now instead of going public allows them to invest more on those projects instead of focusing on quarter to quarter results. Also, avoiding brain-drains post-IPO while they need those talents the most. Raising another round also allows them to have a higher per-share value which helps hiring. It's been a long time since the last round and the real value of Cloudflare's stock offers was higher than what the last funding round would suggest. Now it's easier to point to this round rather than just give vague promises. I do wonder how people feel about this internally though. There's a lot of expectation that the company would go public this year (and some even expected it would go public last year). Hopefully no one needs the money they put in to early exercise any time soon!

Lorin 8y ago

Wish they would fix integrations with 3rd party hosts - Dreamhost integration has been broken for over 5 years.