A decade of building a better Internet
Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010. At the time, the company had a few thousand websites using its services, a small office above a nail salon in Palo Alto, and a team that could be counted on less than two hands. Today, it operates one of the largest networks in the world and serves millions of customers.
Ten years ago, the original vision was to democratize the speed, protection, and reliability that only the largest Internet companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook could afford. That goal remains central to the company's ethos. What has changed is the scale of what the network can do. Because Cloudflare's network was designed to be flexible and programmable, its capabilities have expanded over time to secure the Internet end-to-end—from company infrastructure to individual connections.
Growth over the last year
In the year since going public, Cloudflare has seen record expansion of its customer base. The percentage of the Fortune 1,000 that pays for one or more Cloudflare services rose from 10% at the time of the IPO to more than 16% today. Across the wider web, W3Techs data shows Cloudflare has grown from 10.1% to 14.5% of the top 10 million websites. Over the same period, the next closest provider by website count, Amazon CloudFront, grew from 0.8% to 0.9%.
The company has a tradition of marking its birthday each year with product launches aimed at giving back to the Internet. Three years ago, that meant launching Cloudflare Workers, the edge computing platform. Today, hundreds of thousands of developers use Workers to build applications. This year's birthday week includes a series of new products, with a particular focus on a new data model for Workers that allows more sophisticated applications to be built on the platform.
Perfomance under pressure
It is impossible to look at the last year without acknowledging the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For more than half of Cloudflare's life as a public company, its team has worked remotely. In March, as businesses shifted to working from home, the company made Cloudflare for Teams free through September. This move was a deliberate choice to sacrifice short-term profits to help organizations that were struggling because their legacy VPNs and firewalls could not handle the sudden move to remote work.
The experience reinforces a belief that has guided the company since its founding: the value of the Internet has grown significantly since 2010, and that difference was measurable when the pandemic hit. The medical professionals and scientists fighting the disease are the heroes of the crisis, but the Internet was the faithful sidekick throughout. Cloudflare was able to help ensure it stayed fast, secure, and reliable when it was needed most.
Democratizing security and performance
Cloudflare has a history of taking expensive technologies and making them available to everyone. In 2014, the company launched Universal SSL, making encryption free for all customers. The week it launched, the size of the encrypted web doubled. Let's Encrypt followed shortly after, and together the two efforts have brought encryption to more than 90% of the web.
The same logic applies to DDoS mitigation. Rather than charging premium prices for protection that any site might need, Cloudflare optimized its business to make mitigation inexpensive to deliver, and passed that savings on through Unmetered DDoS Mitigation.
Looking ahead: elections and regulation
Cloudflare also points to work helping secure US election infrastructure. Three and a half years ago, the company launched the Athenian Project, providing free cybersecurity resources to officials administering elections. Today, it helps secure election infrastructure in more than half of US states, with teams working around the clock ahead of upcoming elections.
Further challenges lie ahead. Governments around the world are increasingly looking to regulate the Internet for good reasons, but the risk is a patchwork of laws that only large companies can navigate. Cloudflare plans to engage in these conversations to help ensure that opportunities for startups and entrepreneurs are not lost.
Fighting for the Internet
The company acknowledges that the tech industry's reputation has shifted over the past decade. Too many technology companies have abused customer data, ignored rules, and acted as poor citizens of the communities they serve. But Cloudflare still believes the Internet is a force for good worth defending—with a commitment to keep it always on, fast, secure, private, and available to everyone.
