1.
Managing traffic spikes this holiday season
November 2014
John Graham-Cumming – Programmer
Elenitsa Staykova – Marketing

2.
The web traffic during the holidays
 US: Black Friday & Cyber Monday (11.28 & 12.1) – peak sales days
 Europe: Green Monday (12.8) - peak sales day
Christmas online shopping around the world
Key dates by country (2, 3, 4x normal daily sales)

3.
Calendar of key dates
 Keep track of important dates:
 Thanksgiving day (Nov. 27)
 Black Friday (Nov. 28)
 Cyber Monday (Dec. 1)
 Green Monday (Dec. 8)
 Christmas Eve (Dec. 24)
 Christmas (Dec. 25)

4.
Website conversion rate vs. load times
 Walmart conducted study* (Feb 2012) to understand how website page
performance affects e-commerce conversion rates
 As load times increase from 1 to 4 sec., conversion rates sharply decline

5.
Introduction to CloudFlare
● We help websites run faster, safer and smarter
o Speed up static and dynamic content, optimize images and Javascript delivery
o Defend against DDoS attacks and other common web threats
o Easily enable apps like Google Analytics
● More than 2 million websites have signed up
o Reddit, Meetup, Zendesk, Metallica.com, League of Legends
o Major businesses, banks, and government agencies
o Blogs, forums, and sites of all types and sizes and geographies
● 28 data centers across 5 continents - and growing

6.
How CloudFlare helps manage spikes in traffic
Agenda:
 Hosting provider
 Control the access of certain IPs and regions
 Restore visitor IPs (download mod_cloudflare)
 Extend CloudFlare performance capabilities:
- Send as little data as necessary
- Send data in the right order
- Cache more

7.
Contact hosting provider to understand plan’s
limits
CloudFlare offsets a lot of the load to your site via caching and filtering
requests.
Contact hosting provider to understand actual limits in place for your actual
hosting plan.

8.
Control the access of certain IPs and regions
 If you do not want/need traffic from certain IPs or regions, block them in
your Threat Control panel
 Note: blocking by IP will fully block visitors. Blocking by country will
challenge all visitors from that region with a captcha

9.
Ensure CloudFlare IPs are not restricted
CloudFlare operates as a reverse proxy
to your site and all connections come
from CloudFlare IPs. Restricting our IPs
can cause issues for visitors trying to
access your site.
https://www.cloudflare.com/ips

10.
Restore visitors’ IPs back to server logs
 Ensure visitors’ IPs show in your server logs
 Install “mod_cloudflare” to restore original visitor IP back to server
logs
 mod_cloudflare: search for “mod_cloudflare” in
support.cloudflare.com to get complete list of instructions

11.
Extend CloudFlare performance capabilities
Where to access these settings?

12.
CloudFlare Settings

13.
Send as little data as necessary
AFTER AUTO MINIFY BEFORE AUTO MINIFY

14.
Send as little data as necessary, in right order

15.
CloudFlare Network Map
https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map

16.
Websites combine many elements
● Static (CloudFlare automatically caches)
o Images
o JavaScript
o Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and many more!
● Dynamic (not cached without Page Rules)
o HTML
o JSON
o PHP (example...many more!)

17.
Cache Everything Page Rule
Go beyond default caching, for the fastest site
imaginable.

18.
Cache Everything Page Rule - example

19.
Cache Everything Page Rule - custom caching

20.
Cache Everything
Page Rule
edge cache expire
TTL

21.
Cache Everything
Page Rule
browser cache
expire TTL

22.
Cache Everything & Single File Purge
Cache Everything in Page Rules is the fastest
way to deliver pages, or an entire site.
But use carefully, and know how to purge
single files in dashboard or via API.

23.
Purging cache -- single files (for performance)
Client API - https://www.cloudflare.com/docs/client-api.html
(for programmatic purging of the cache)

24.
Purge everything (only when necessary)

25.
Forwarding Page Rule
Redirect at the edge of the network, instead of
waiting for the request to come all the way to
your server.

26.
Forwarding Page Rule - redirect at the edge

27.
Forwarding Page Rule - Add new rule

28.
Forwarding Page Rule - set location and type

29.
Forwarding Page Rule - the result
Try it for yourself: https://twitter.theburritobot.com

30.
Q&A
Resources for future reference
● www.cloudflare.com/support
● Connect with us:
o blog.cloudflare.com
o www.facebook.com/cloudflare
o www.twitter.com/cloudflare
o plus.google.com/+cloudflare
Thanks!