Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kdheiwns 33 days ago
Yeah, their origin is a story of absolute incredible luck. Cloudflare came out of nowhere and suddenly massive sites with huge user bases around the world, including places like 4chan, were getting DDoSed. Then they immediately announce that they transitioned to Cloudflare. Hell of a lucky time to make a company that the entire internet suddenly became absolutely dependent on.

The funny thing about that era is you knew they started using Cloudflare because they went from stable with constant uptime to going down and showing a Cloudflare banner randomly all the time for a good year or so. They ran worse with Cloudflare than they did while they were allegedly getting DDoSed. The whole company glows, as the late great HN commenter Terry Davis would've said.
2 comments
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 33 days ago
Am i the only one that actually remembers this time period? It wasn’t that long ago. The confidence of your assertion is completely misplaced. I remember exactly where i was when I first read about CF, on launch day. DDoS attacks were CERTAINLY a big issue before Cloudflare came along. A whole lot of script kiddie energy was poured into them. LHC? Slowloris? IRC C2? This wasn’t niche stuff. That’s why I remember the CF launch, because I and everyone else knew that it was a big deal, given what the landscape had been for quite some time. Sorry if you personally didn’t have your finger on the pulse for whatever reason, but this was far from a niche issue, even for big sites / usual targets like 4chan.
link
kdheiwns 33 days ago
I was there and recalled there being occasional script kiddy DDoS attacks here and there. But the uptime when being attacked was still much, much better than the first 1-2 years of actually using Cloudflare.
link
Imustaskforhelp 33 days ago
> as the late great HN commenter Terry Davis would've said.

Oh my god, this is how & when I realize that Terry Davis (Rest in peace) used to use Hackernews too: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10061171 (From this comment written by terry):

"I wrote all the code from scratch, including a 20,000 line of code compiler that makes x86_64 machine code from HolyC or Asm and operates AOT and JIT.

My JIT mode is not interpreted. It optimizes and compiles to x86_64 machine code.

I was chosen by God because I am the best programmer on the planet and God boosted my IQ with divine intellect." -Terry A Davis.

link