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Comment by Tossrock | Hacker News Reader

My bullshit detector went off somewhere around here: "CloudFlare provides performance and security for any website online.We handle more traffic through our network now than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga and Aol combined."

Considering Wiki, Twitter and Amazon are all top 10 global sites, I'm having a hard time imagining someone doing more traffic than all of them put together, even disregarding the rounding errors of Zynga/AOL. Anyone have more concrete statistics to confirm/deny this?

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Here's our internal data on this. Based on page view data (values below are page views) and using the statistics from Google DoubleClick Ad Planner (http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/) we have the following for the last 30 days:

    Wikipedia.org    6,000,000,000
    Twitter.com      5,900,000,000
    Amazon.com       4,900,000,000
    Aol.com          5,400,000,000
    Zynga.com          460,000,000
    Total           22,660,000,000

Then looking at our own internal network for the last 30 days we see:

    CloudFlare      27,066,719,054

So we did about 4.4B more page views than the combined sites above which would actually leave us room to add LinkedIn and Flickr to the list.

Are you confident that you're comparing apples to apples there, and not e.g. pageviews to http requests?

Yes. We have detailed stats on page views, hits, bandwidth, cache hits, etc. etc. Looking at the most recent data which I get daily I see in the trailing 30 days: 27B page views and 162B hits.

Much of Twitter and Zynga's "traffic" won't show up as pageviews - they'll be API calls that Ad Planner wouldn't pick up.

Regardless, that is a pretty remarkable amount of data. What makes it worth carrying at zero cost?

LuzSec did not 'disappear'. They became Anti-Sec, and they are still around.

While I don't have any statistics, I do not doubt their claim. CloudFlare is a CDN, and as such will handle an enormous amount of traffic. As an example of this, Akamai, a large CDN, handles approximately 20% of the total traffic on the internet. In fact, many sites, such as Wikipedia, Twitter, even Amazon and Google, actually host static content through Akamai. All this content adds up to significant amounts of traffic.

EDIT: Link -- http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html

My understanding is that CloudFlare runs a CDN delivering content for thousands and thousands of sites. This means it basically has to handle all the traffic for all of its customers. I'm sure that adds up really quickly.

It doesn't seem that surprising. Just digging around in the passive DNS database at work, I see CloudFlare has their name servers in the NS records of several 10's of thousands of domains. I'm fairly sure that given the scope of the sources of this data, that list is nowhere near complete.

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