Cloudflare

Cloudflare runs a global network that sits in front of websites and applications. Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn founded it in 2009, and it launched in 2010 at the TechCrunch Disrupt event. The headquarters is in San Francisco.

The core service is a content delivery network and reverse proxy. It caches pages close to visitors, filters malicious traffic and absorbs denial-of-service attacks. A free plan made it common among small sites, and paid tiers serve larger companies.

The company also offers DNS, domain registration, Workers for running code at the network edge, R2 object storage and Zero Trust tools for securing company access. Its Turnstile product checks visitors without puzzles. Cloudflare publishes research on internet traffic and outages through its blog and Radar site. Prince remains chief executive. The company runs data centers in more than a hundred countries, and a large share of the web passes through its network. It also publishes a public DNS resolver at the address 1.1.1.1 that people can use free of charge.