7 ms·

What if this had been Akamai and not Cloudflare? Would we even hear about it? Why is Cloudflare in the news regularly and never Akamai? Do they just like drama?

• kyrra 14y ago
  Cloudflare uses it as advertising. "Look at this attack we mitigated for our client!", which then gets picked up by HN and similar sites because Cloudflare does write fairly good blog posts about it. As others have said, Cloudflare does a fairly good job explaining parts of the internet that most of us don't get to see, so it gets attention.
  • youngtaff 14y ago
    It gets picked up by HN as CloudFlare post it to HN themselves. That said they're interesting articles if you ignore the hype.
  • drakaal 14y ago
    More like they invent drama to cover their bad days. Akamai tells its clients when they are under DDoS, Akamai didn't really notice anything going on. CF just had a bad day and decided to make a story out of it. One other time when CF claimed a DDoS it was because the Google Bot Decided to up it's crawl rate, and took down many CF sites. CF told clients it was DDoS and then later admitted it was an issue with Google.
• kaolinite 14y ago
  Definitely good for their business that many people think it was a groundbreaking attack and CloudFlare stood strong against it.
• trotsky 14y ago
  As an observation, the same day the new york times story ran sharespost announced that they had just added cloudfare to their secondary market platform. This typically means that an insider such as a founder or early investor plans to auction some of their shares. They can't put that in the media story as that breaks SEC rules, but positive press is very likely to drive up share pricing.
  • eastdakota 14y ago
    We have no plans to allow CloudFlare's shares to be traded via Sharespost or any secondary market. We'll investigate if Sharespost has done something without our permission.
• bicknergseng 14y ago
  IMO and not very familiar on the similarities between Akamai and CF, if Akamai handle's similar issues without driving pr/marketing efforts based on them that's their loss and probably a bad business play. In my mind, this is similar to an antivirus company saying "hey look at all these nasty viruses out there, but we find and destroy them effectively." This really just seems like effective case-studying on CF's part. It's arguably their job to hype it as much as possible (though of course they are responsible for the inaccuracies).
  • larrys 14y ago
    "if Akamai handle's similar issues without driving pr/marketing efforts based on them that's their loss and probably a bad business play." Akamai has been around since 1998. Cloudflare since 2009 (both according according to crunchbase which jives with the date the domain were registered iim). Consequently the established company has more to lose and less to gain from the publicity then the newer company. For a newer company any publicity is good publicity even if it's over a negative event because you have less to lose and more to gain add: and people become familiar with your name. Taking this to an extreme example (to make a point) let's say you start a new hamburger restaurant. You have no customers. On day 5 some people get sick (just sick not deathly sick). All the sudden you are in the local paper with a headline and a story that people just skim but they see your name. Almost guaranteed you will pick up business from the mention. Even though it's bad PR all the sudden down the road people will remember you and either forget or not care about the negative story they read 6 mos. prior (add: assuming they even read the story and didn't just see the headline).
    • snowwrestler 14y ago
      Akamai is not really in the DDOS mitigation business. They are in the CDN business, and "DDOS protection" is just one way they market their CDN resources.
      • moe 14y ago
        Actually Akamai is very much pushing their DDoS protection and "Antivirus" snake oil ever since the CDN market started collapsing. Remember Akamai is the Oracle of the CDN world. They're in a bit of a shuffle right now as their competitors have long caught up and offer the same for less, minus the legendary Akamai-arrogance.
• snowwrestler 14y ago
  Because most companies who employ DDOS mitigation services want discretion, and smart DDOS protection companies are discrete. Even Cloudflare does not discuss most of their high-end customers. In this case Spamhaus gave them permission to write it up. Cloudflare differs from most DDOS mitigation companies because of their low-dollar, self-service tier. This gives them a reason to blog, and customers and attacks to talk about. Most DDOS companies only provide bespoke service for $$$, and those contracts usually come with silence requirements. Akamai is not 2nd on the list of DDOS mitigation companies, BTW. I know a couple companies who left Akamai for DOS Arrest, one of great companies you'll never see mentioned in a NYTimes article (because that's how their customer want it).
  • hhw 14y ago
    Exactly. DoS Arrest was using BGP anycast for DDoS mitigation long before CloudFlare even existed. We had customers on their service back in 2008. I'm somewhat skeptical of CloudFlare's low-cost approach to DDoS mitigation. Going for volume on low MRC clients means that you have a lot of potential targets on your network. And attacks against any one customer can always impact every other customer, which puts you constantly at risk, even if you yourself are not attacked all that often.