Overview
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network (CDN) services, internet security, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation, and distributed DNS. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol NET.
Cloudflare's services are positioned between website visitors and the hosting providers that serve those websites. Rather than replacing a site's origin server, the company's network sits in front of it, handling incoming requests before they reach the origin. This intermediary position is what allows the same infrastructure to address performance, reliability, and security together: content can be served closer to the visitor, unwanted traffic can be filtered out before it consumes origin resources, and requests can continue to be handled even when the origin is under strain.
History
Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. The company established its headquarters in San Francisco, California, where it remains based. Cloudflare later became a publicly traded company, with its shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NET.
Services
Cloudflare's offerings center on infrastructure that operates between end users and the servers hosting the content they request. Its principal service areas include:
- Content Delivery Network — A CDN that distributes and serves website content, reducing the distance and number of requests between visitors and origin hosting providers in order to improve loading performance.
- Internet Security — Security services applied to traffic as it passes through the network, intended to protect websites and the infrastructure behind them from malicious requests.
- DDoS Mitigation — Protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks, in which large volumes of traffic are directed at a target in an attempt to overwhelm it and make it unavailable. Because Cloudflare's network receives requests before the origin does, attack traffic can be absorbed or filtered upstream of the customer's own servers.
- Distributed DNS — Authoritative Domain Name System service operated across a distributed infrastructure, resolving domain names to the addresses of the servers that answer for them.
How It Works
A site using Cloudflare directs its DNS records to the company's network, so that requests from visitors arrive at Cloudflare rather than at the origin host directly. From that vantage point the service can return cached content without contacting the origin, apply security policies to the request, and decide whether the traffic should be passed through at all. The origin hosting provider continues to store and generate the underlying content; what changes is the path that visitor traffic takes to reach it.
This arrangement is the common thread across the company's product areas. Performance improvements, reliability benefits, and security filtering all derive from the same structural fact — that the network handles requests before they arrive at their destination.
Corporate Information
Cloudflare is a public company whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NET. Further information about the company and its services is available on its official website.