CloudFlare

Background

2011BlackFridayAds.com provides a one-stop resource to find out what all the biggest retailers will be offering on Black Friday. We have been tracking Black Friday deals since 2008. This year, if you search Google for “Black Friday 2011,” among the more than 71 million sites returned, 2011BlackFridayAds.com is the first result.

Business challenge

We have been through this time of year before and knew the amount of traffic to our site could spike significantly in the days leading up to Black Friday. So, in late September, we signed up for CloudFlare to help manage the coming load. Because 2011BlackFridayAds.com is hosted through MediaTemple, one of CloudFlare’s hosting partners, setting up CloudFlare took literally two clicks and less than a minute. The graph below shows the growth in traffic over the last month, peaking in the last 24 hours at nearly 3 million page views a day (about 35 per second).

CloudFlare’s impact

CloudFlare didn’t just make our site safer and protect it from attacks, they also significantly reduced the load on our servers so they could keep up with visitors’ requests. In fact, CloudFlare cut the number of requests that needed to be handled by our server by nearly half a billion, or about 75% of the total load it would have experienced without CloudFlare. They also saved our site more than 23 Terabytes, 93% of the bandwidth that would have otherwise been used serving the site’s pages.

CloudFlare helped us stay fast and reliable, even under a crushing load, and the effect kept us at the top of the rankings and kept the traffic growing. CloudFlare has done wonders for us this year. It’s amazing how fast the site loads.