Cloudflare’s origins trace back to 2004, when co-founders Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway launched “Project Honey Pot,” an open-source project designed to track email spam harvesters and online threats using distributed honeypots. This project quickly revealed a bigger need: People did not just want to see threats; they wanted the tools to stop them.
In July 2009, Prince, Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn officially founded Cloudflare to expand the Honey Pot insights into a wider web security and performance service. They developed a reverse proxy that combined CDN capabilities with threat blocking. The company publicly launched on September 27, 2010, and quickly gained traction with a model that offered strong free protections. For the first time, small online businesses had access to protections previously reserved for the largest companies.
Today, Cloudflare is a leading American internet infrastructure and security company that:
- Operates one of the world’s largest global cloud networks
- Spans over 330 cities in more than 120 countries
- Serves millions of websites
- Handles a significant portion of global web traffic (around 20 percent in recent years)
Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet by making it faster, more secure, reliable, and private for everyone—from individuals and small blogs, to Mid-Market companies and large enterprises. To learn more about Cloudflare and their internet solutions—especially around the Mid-Market—reach out to our team today at CloudflareSales@radius-climb.com!