We met the CloudFlare team while we were at TechCrunch Disrupt last September, and we think their product as well as their co-founders, Matthew and Michelle, are awesome! CloudFlare was runner up for best startup at the conference, and they’ve been growing leaps and bounds since then.
CloudFlare sits between your web site and the internet, making it faster by acting like a CDN for your entire site, and more secure by blocking evil bots and the like. The original article on TechCrunch summarizes what they do quite well. CloudFlare is completely free to sign up for. They have paid upgrades with additional features, but there aren’t any limits on free accounts for things like how much traffic you have. So if you think your site is slow, we wholeheartedly recommend trying them out.
This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, they announced their latest initiative, called CloudFlare Apps, which launches on June 1. It’s launching with 20 services, and Clicky is one of them.
“CloudFlare’s users have asked for a realtime analytics solution since we launched,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of CloudFlare. “Rather than reinvent the wheel and build our own, we are proud to offer a great solution like Clicky that lets any website owner see who is on their site as they click from page to page.”
A common problem for many web services like Clicky is that people need to copy and paste code onto their site to start using the service. CloudFlare is trying to solve this with their new Apps service, which allows anyone using CloudFlare to install web apps like Clicky with a single click of their mouse. We get a lot of emails about this from new users, so it’s a very real problem, and we think this is a great solution.
How do they do it? CloudFlare serves all of your web site’s traffic, so they can automatically insert additional code into your HTML as it travels through their servers. So if you opt in to Clicky, they’ll add our code at the bottom of all of your pages automatically as each one is served. And if we ever update the format of our code, CloudFlare will update it too, ensuring you always have the latest and greatest.
We think this is fantastic in all regards, so we’re really excited to be a launch partner!
UPDATE! Someone tweeted that they were excited about this partnership because it meant they could finally use Clicky on their Posterous blog, which currently only allows Google Analytics in terms of Javascript tracking. We hadn’t considered this, but the potential here is really great. There are tons of hosted services out there that don’t allow you to add third party Javascript to them, but as long as you can slap your own domain on top of it, you’ll be able to do this with CloudFlare. Very cool!
