CloudFlare launched almost exactly 2 years ago at the first TechCrunch Disrupt SF. It was an incredible experience for us and we owe a significant amount of our success to the stage Disrupt provided us. Since then, we've rolled out 23 data centers (one per month since launch), added more than half a million customers' websites, and powered nearly half a trillion page views through the CloudFlare network. It's been quite a two years.

One of the most rewarding things for us has been getting to help other companies as they launched at the four Disrupt events since: New York 2011, San Francisco 2011, Beijing 2011, and New York 2012. CloudFlare's bread and butter is keeping sites running fast and stable even during huge bursts in traffic. And, if launching at Disrupt does one thing, it's deliver a huge burst of traffic. By our count, we've helped about 25% of the Battlefield companies over the last two years ensure their sites stay online even under the crushing load a Disrupt launch brings.

As Disrupt San Francisco 2012 gets started, I thought it would be cool to reach out to some of the standout companies that launched a year ago in order to give you a behind the scenes peek at what it's like to launch there. Tony Gauda, CEO of Bitcasa (Battlefield Finalist), Rebecca Woodcock, CEO of CakeHealth (Battlefield Finalist), and Jevon MacDonald CEO of GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce) were all standouts from last year's competition. Their sites were also all on CloudFlare for the launch, so we have the actual log data on what their servers saw. They agreed to let me tell a bit about their experience and share details from their traffic logs in order to prepare companies in the Battlefield for what to expect.

To get a sense of what Battlefield companies can expect, we aggregated the log data of 20 companies that were on CloudFlare's network when they launched. While the exact numbers vary, here's what happens to their websites:

• Over the three days at TC Disrupt, expect your site to get an average of a 3x to 10x surge in traffic.

• For the average company that doesn't make the finals, expect between 10,000 - 20,000 page views per day during TC Disrupt, about 20% of that traffic concentrated during the hour that you're on stage.

• If you have a consumer appeal you can expect to get more traffic than if you are business or enterprise focused.

• If you effectively leverage social media, you can use the Disrupt audience to further amplify the traffic to your site.

• Traffic builds over all three days of the competition, even if you don't make the finals. The largest spike for most companies occurs when TechCrunch publishes the article about your company (usually shortly after you're on stage).

• For companies that do make the finals, traffic can reach hundreds of requests per second during the time you are on stage and when the winners are announced.

You only get to launch once. Doing so in front of a live, tech savvy audience of 3,000, not to mention untold numbers of people watching via the live stream, is nerve wracking. There are horror stories every competitor hears, like when RedBeacon, during Disrupt's predecessor TC50 event, had their site completely crash during their presentation. It's comforting to remember that it didn't hurt them much and they went on to win their year of the competition. I remember getting dinner with my co-founders Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn the night before our launch at a little Italian restaurant in SOMA called La Bricola. CloudFlare still wasn't fully working, and we all planned to work late into the night, but for a few minutes the three of us took a break to have dinner and some wine. Our toast that evening: "Please just don't let the servers melt."

Just about every company as they get ready to launch at Disrupt has the same concern. "Leading up to TechCrunch Disrupt, we were super nervous. We didn't know what would happen with our site when we stepped on stage," recounted Jevon MacDonald from GoInstant. Below is a screenshot from the CloudFlare control panel showing exactly what did happen to GoInstant's site. GoInstant launched on stage September 13 and traffic to the site continued to climb, peaking at over 20,000 page views on the 14th, as the company demoed the product and Disrupt attendees checked it out. The dashboard shows traffic from big press hits in Forbes, PC Magazine, and _ZDNet_later in the month, but they were dwarfed by the traffic that Disrupt sent the site.

"You're always nervous that something will go wrong or something will crash," Rebecca Woodcock from CakeHealth recounted, "but you need to focus on your presentation and telling the story of the product you've built." CakeHealth launched on Monday and was one of the seven companies to make it to the Disrupt Battlefield Finals. Traffic to the site continued to grow over the three days. In total, CakeHealth's site received more than 2 million hits in less than 72 hours. When Rebecca was giving her final pitch the site was seeing several hundred requests per second.

Bitcasa was another of the seven Disrupt Battlefield Finalists and saw an even bigger spike in traffic. "We had a couple EC2 instances for our website," explained Tony Gauda from Bitcasa. "We'd spent our time focusing on ensuring the backend and the product were built out, we hadn't worried about building out our web infrastructure." Bitcasa had a consumer appeal and saw an even bigger spike in traffic. Over the threedays of the conference, 85,318 people sign up for their beta. "Disrupt sent the initial traffic of influencers to our site and we then encouraged them to tell their friends about Bitcasa via social media. The result was beyond what we could have ever imagined."

Everyone I've talked to who has launched at Disrupt remembers the experience extremely fondly. Whether you win or lose, once you've been on that stage you will forever be a part of the TechCrunch family, and that's something that pays dividends for your company for years to come. At CloudFlare, we've been proud to help a number of Disrupt companies with their launch. This year is no different. We've gotten a sneak peak at a few that will be launching over the next few days at Disrupt SF 2012 and, while we're sworn to strict secrecy, I can say two things:1) It's going to be a great competition; and 2) I've already made my prediction hinting at who I think the winner will be.

To everyone launching over the next two days, best of luck from the CloudFlare team. The best advice I can offer is this: this is a once in a lifetime experience. Enjoy it!

Early Saturday afternoon, hundreds of hackers filled tables in a cavernous building in San Francisco, staking out their power cords and testing the Internet connection. This was the start of TechCrunch Disrupt's 2011 SF hackathon. CloudFlare jumped in to sponsor pizza and a $1,000 prize for the best CloudFlare App created during the hackathon.

Eight members of the CloudFlare team were there during the event to support hackers, answer questions about our new developers site, and hand out pizza.

CloudFlare pizza plate

After watching 130 one minute presentations, CloudFlare couldn't stop smiling at one demonstration.

A team from Hungary decided to think small, with an elegant game played only in the 16x16 pixel space commonly occupied by the favicon, the tiny image in a browser tab. Among an audience of their developer peers, the game from the United Task team earned applause, laughs and some gasps for their original name, which abbreviated "FAvorite Game icon."

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince was pleased to hand over the big money (literally) and name this hack as the winner of CloudFlare's $1,000 cash prize.

Quickly, the team turned their hack into a new CloudFlare App, available for free to all CloudFlare site owners. The App, named Favris, turns your favicon into a small tribute to the world's favorite block game.

[

](https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/favris)

We first met the United Task team after they presented their hack. Since Sunday, we've had a chance to welcome three members of their team to the CloudFlare office, and asked Hagyma a few questions.

While doing serious stuff, we sometimes have crazy things in mind. One of us Gabor was reading about html canvas, and told us about it. Shortly we knew, we have something for the HACKATHON!

We mostly worked against each other, we set in front of just one laptop and shouting at whoever was typing. One of us [Kescke] was unable to come to TCD, he was probably the most effective from overseas.

It took more than we thought, but thank God, we didn't have to present before noon on Sunday. :)

We are a webapp dev company from Budapest, Hungary. We did many things for clients, and decided to go on with some of our ideas as a startup. Since we don't have experience, we wanted to see how things are going in the valley.

Install Favris on your CloudFlare-powered site today, for free.

CloudFlare launched about a year ago at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. It's been a pretty incredible year, and it all began at that conference. We're big fans of TechCrunch (even if we lost the competition to a service that reads Wikipedia aloud) and so we wanted to do something to support them this year.

I'm excited to announce that CloudFlare will have a big presence at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. First, we're providing the pizza for dinner on Saturday night. As the plates we had printed up for the event read:

GET /pizza 200 OKPUT /pizza?location=mouth 202 ACCEPTEDGET /pizza 410 GONE

Second, we're giving a $1,000 cash prize for the Hackathon hacker who creates the best CloudFlare App. I'm helping judge the competition on Sunday and many folks from CloudFlare's engineering team will be on hand throughout the 24 hours of the event helping hackers build on top of CloudFlare's platform. We're providing an API framework to create new apps as well as the globally distributed infrastructure on which to deploy them so they're super fast.

CloudFlare has already made it one-click simple to add some of the leading web apps to any CloudFlare website. Current apps include mainstream services like Google Analytics, Smartling, Clicky, and VigLink. But we're also proud of the fact that we support smaller app developers like Erik Rothoff Andersson who created the fun game Browser Blaster and now receives a check every month from the CloudFlare users who have installed his game. We're excited to now make it easy for any developer to easily develop, deploy, and get paid for their work from the more than 100,000 websites that have signed up for CloudFlare. While one app will win the $1,000 prize, we're hoping that we can find a bunch of new app developers who we can add to the CloudFlare Apps Marketplace.

If you're going to be in the San Francisco area and you want to participate in the Hackathon, you can find details and register on the TechCrunch Disrupt website. Information for developers is available for all, not just this weekend's hackers.

P.S. - Yes, we really did print up a giant check and will hand it over on Sunday to the winner.

CloudFlare launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September 2010. When you walked in the front door of that conference, the first booth you came to was the one for Media Temple. We immediately hit it off with the company that is focused on delivering their customers a solid service with great design.

Over the last year, we've build a close relationship. After many emails, several phone calls, and a quick trip to LA, Matthew, CloudFlare's CEO and cofounder, met with the Media Temple CEO at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. He understood the benefits immediately. What was clear to him was clear to our entire team and community: Media Temple and CloudFlare are a great match.

Up until today, we've had several thousand Media Temple customers sign up for our service through our website. What is different today is you can click a single button in the Media Temple interface and begin to enjoy the benefits of CloudFlare without having to change anything else. We're excited to welcome Media Temple as a CloudFlare Certified Hosting Provider.

If you're a Media Temple customer, and you're already on CloudFlare, there's nothing you need to do. If you're a Media Temple customer, and you're not yet on CloudFlare, look for the CloudFlare button in your (mt) AccountCenter. One click and your site will be twice as fast and protected from bad people.

It feels like CloudFlare and Media Temple have long been old friends. We're excited to affirm that friendship and make it possible for all of our users to get the benefits of both platforms.

Resources:Learn more about CloudFlare at Media Temple here

On Thursday, April 29, CloudFlare won the Judge's award at Under The Radar, an event showcasing new technology in the Silicon Valley. CloudFlare's co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince, shared CloudFlare's story with the audience. Since CloudFlare launched six months ago at TechCrunch Disrupt, we've saved 1000 years of time for web surfers, stopped 750M threats and brought the performance and security tools previously reserved for the Internet Giants to tens of thousands of websites.

Matthew's energy resonated with the entire audience as he delivered an engaging presentation. You can watch Matthew's 6 minute presentation here.

Everyone on the CloudFlare team is excited about the new initiatives we're working on. The next six months are going to bring even bigger and better performance, security and benefits to the entire CloudFlare community. Stay tuned!