FoundMyself

FoundMyself is an online community and marketplace for artists and art lovers to buy and sell artwork. Unlike similar sites, Foundmyself runs on an honor system where artists can post and sell artwork free of charge. “Artists can donate if they want,” said Trevor Hunt, FoundMyself creator, “but if they’d rather not, that’s fine too. It’s really about the art!”

FoundMyself strives to provide artists a modern, robust, and powerful marketing platform, while being as cost effective as possible to maintain this donation based structure.

FoundMyself's Challenge: Maximum Performance at Minimal Cost

For sites like Foundmyself, maximizing performance and minimizing cost are crucial to success. Speed was my main concern, since a well-performing site is so essential for happy visitors,” explained Hunt. “Likewise, we were looking for a solution that would reduce our site latency to please the search engine gods and improve our search rankings.”

Foundmyself was thus looking for an affordable performance solution that was easy to implement, but powerful in result.

Foundmyself’s Solution: Instant Performance Boost at the Flip of a Switch

“Our hosting provider, Dreamhost, introduced Cloudflare to me through their control panel. After looking into it and giving their free plan a try, it was a no-brainer to get on board,” noted Hunt. “I noticed an immediate improvement in our site’s load times when began using Cloudflare’s CDN. Plus, our site got 22% faster just by flipping the switch on the new Argo Smart Routing service.”

Internet requests for millions of websites run through Cloudflare’s network, which provides real world intelligence on the true health and reliability of network paths. Argo's smart routing algorithm then uses this information to route Foundmyself’s traffic across the fastest paths available, and maintains open, secure connections to even further reduce latency that is often imposed by connection-setup.

Plus, by signing up for performance, Foundmyself also got Cloudflare’s DDoS protection and WAF (Web Application Firewall), which help protect Foundmyself by respectively blocking malicious attacks and reducing spam. Hunt explained: “The number of spammers on Foundmyself has been cut down significantly by Cloudflare’s WAF, which means I have more time to focus on delivering new features and improvements to our users. Plus, the DDoS protection gives me peace of mind against potential future attacks.”

In the last month Cloudflare’s WAF blocked 2,546 threats aimed at FoundMyself’s marketplace. Cloudflare’s WAF leverages the same Internet intelligence that Argo does, but instead draws from an IP Reputation database to block IP’s of actors that have been marked as spammers. In turn, sites like Foundmyself enjoy a dramatic reduction in the amount of spam content on their site.