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Most of you have probably had the experience of visiting a website and finding that it’s running incredibly slowly, or that it has disappeared because of some attack. Big companies try to fix this problem by using content distribution networks (CDNs) and hiring security teams.
Now a startup called CloudFlare said it can bring comparable services to small Web publishers who can’t afford big-company solutions. Co-founder and chief executive Matthew Prince said publishers just add some code to their servers, then their sites are running on top of CloudFlare infrastructure.
CloudFlare is free, so it has already signed up 1,000 websites with a total of 6 million unique visitors. Prince said CloudFlare reduces page load times by about 30 percent on average and stops many spam attacks — in fact, he said the company ran a test showing that CloudFlare would have stopped the recent Twitter hack.
The Palo Alto, Calif. company launched at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. It has raised $2.05 million, and although the basic service is free, it will charge for additional features.