Security Service Accidentally Makes Websites 60% Faster

EastDakota writes "CloudFlare was originally conceived by the team behind the open source community. Project Honey Pot as an easy way to protect any website from hackers and spammers. The concern from the beginning was that it would add latency. It was quite a surprise when the free service launched 8 months ago and ended up speeding up websites by 60%."

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

The article about the anti-spam article looks itself to be astroturf spam.

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[DWMorse]

Yo dawg, we heard you hate news about spam, so we put spam in your news so you can hate while you hate.

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[Nursie]

Badly written too. FTFA -

"In 2007 the Department of Homeland Security reached out to Prince, essentially asking him if he had any idea what technology that he owned."

WFT?

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[Anonymous Coward]

I the article and I the entire thing perfectly.

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[JWSmythe]

    No, it's Old English. "What Fuck Thee?" Roughly meaning "I found you in the barn with a sheep and a goat. Which one were you fucking?"

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[chill]

That wasn't a sheep and a goat, that was your wife and daughter.

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[bipedalhominid]

WFT = Who Fucketh Thee?

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[lee1]

The entire article is incoherent. At the point we reach this particular garbled sentence, we have no idea what Prince's relationship is with Project Honey Pot. And we never hear anything further about DHS. We don't find out how exactly CloudFlare "makes sites faster," and I have no reason to believe it does that, or anything else useful.

Speed up summary

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the article, the speed boost comes from two things: 1) CloudFlare sniffs your content and inline replaces sections of it with equivalent content all served via the same connection... so the speedup comes from only having to use a single connection to get the entire page and 2) They are a globally distributed content system with 12 global data centers, similar to Akamai but smaller in scale, allowing content to come from a location closer to the end user.

The gist of it

[Anubis IV]

They offer a security product for websites, and in the process of designing it so that it didn't add much latency, they inadvertently made it into a CDN that speeds things up. There. Now we all know what the trick is.

Re:The gist of it

[enoz]

In a strange synergy your comment is roughly 60% the size of TFS but contains 100% more information about the topic at hand.

Re:SPAM?

[dermoth666]

It wouldn't be if they actually had invented the CDN. They's unfortunately about 12 years late...

Interesting concept, but secure?

[Lazy Jones]

While they can certainly protect a site from various threats better than the average programmer (XSS etc.), the downside is that all login and personal information also goes through their site, enabling them (or a rogue government) to collect it. Also, their concept is great for launching targeted attacks at specific users, i.e. sending them tailored content like trojans (of course such attacks by rogue governments are feasible without CF, but harder). The question is: should they be trusted more than your own employees and your ISP? Right now, here in Europe, I'd say: for important stuff, no.
That said, here's an idea for a useful "app": automated A/B-testing for your site (build 2 versions of your website and let them decide who sees what, combine with Google Analytics or other stats => see which version works better for your users).

Re:Custom HOSTS files can achieve the same

[datapharmer]

please mod the parent -1 ignorant. The anonymous solution is for clients, the article is about servers. You all lose your geek membership cards.