
Cloudflare Raises $150M and Adds to Board of Directors - migueldemoura
https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2019/cloudflare-raises-usd150m-and-adds-to-board-of-directors/
======
krn
CDNPerf[1] provides a real-time performance analysis of all major CDN
providers.

I have researched this space a lot, and my conclusions are:

\- Cloudflare: the best all-in-one solution, as long as you don't go above the
Business tier

\- Fastly: the most technically advanced CDN, but also one of the most
expensive ones (there is a reason why StackExchange and Reddit moved from
Cloudflare to Fastly)

\- KeyCDN: the best fully-featured value-for-money CDN, if you just want to
replace AWS Cloudfront CDN / Google Cloud CDN / Azure CDN

\- BunnyCDN: the best value-for-money CDN for distributing large static assets
across the globe (can get as low as $0.0025 / GB)

[1] [https://www.cdnperf.com/](https://www.cdnperf.com/)

~~~
porker
> \- Fastly: the most technically advanced CDN, but also one of the most
> expensive ones (there is a reason why StackExchange and Reddit moved from
> Cloudflare to Fastly)

Especially with the crazy SSL pricing. I appreciate there are technical
difficulties, but LetsEncrypt has been out what - 2 years? And Fastly still
want $100/month for a shared certificate.

~~~
foobarbazetc
Fastly also don’t support proxying WebSockets. They told us we should switch
to long polling which would have driven up our costs with them significantly
since they charge per request — funny how that works.

Still, definitely the most interesting CDN if you can’t do your own thing.
Network still isn’t where Akamai or EdgeCast are. Lots of good people there,
though.

~~~
jkarneges
And if anyone needs more than just proxying WebSockets, there's Fanout Cloud
which can manage WebSockets without requiring 1:1 connections with the origin.

------
sascha_sl
I'd rather see some serious competition for Cloudflare to be honest. They're
slowly becoming the best and only choice. Competitors exist (like Incapsula)
but they're usually just not that good.

~~~
josefresco
I too was curious about competitors so I searched and found the following
(there are lots more). Granted some of these probably don't overlap perfectly
with CF, but they do offer at least "hosted dns":

[https://cloud.google.com/dns/](https://cloud.google.com/dns/)

[https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/premium-
dns](https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/premium-dns)

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/services/dns/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/dns/)

[https://dyn.com/dns/managed-dns/](https://dyn.com/dns/managed-dns/)

[https://www.namecheap.com/domains/freedns/](https://www.namecheap.com/domains/freedns/)
(free option)

~~~
ATsch
I haven't tried namecheap DNS recently, but I used to use it. I hated DNS. It
would just take hours and hours for any change to propagate, regardless of TTL
and it was just extremely painful to work with. I thought this was just the
way DNS was, until I switched to cloudflare. Suddenly, new records appeared
instantly and changes applied in seconds or minutes it felt like pure magic.

So, that's my review of Namecheap freeDNS. I suppose they make it bad on
purpose so people upgrade to their premium DNS?

~~~
asah
+1 love namecheap but DNS would regularly fail esp "v2"

------
throwaway309098
ex-cloudflarer:

Cloudflare is undergoing a lot of big projects to break away from the image
that they are "just a CDN". Raising a round now instead of going public allows
them to invest more on those projects instead of focusing on quarter to
quarter results. Also, avoiding brain-drains post-IPO while they need those
talents the most.

Raising another round also allows them to have a higher per-share value which
helps hiring. It's been a long time since the last round and the real value of
Cloudflare's stock offers was higher than what the last funding round would
suggest. Now it's easier to point to this round rather than just give vague
promises.

I do wonder how people feel about this internally though. There's a lot of
expectation that the company would go public this year (and some even expected
it would go public last year). Hopefully no one needs the money they put in to
early exercise any time soon!

------
nabla9
According to the news Cloudflare was planning $3.5 billion IPO this year.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cloudflare-ipo/web-
perfor...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cloudflare-ipo/web-performance-
software-company-cloudflare-readies-ipo-sources-idUSKCN1MX2SI)

~~~
lhorak
Well let's see about that. I've heard about companies "planning" IPOs...

------
aboutruby
> Mar 12, 2019 - Series E - $150M

> Sep 22, 2015 - Series D - $110M

> Dec 17, 2013 - Series C - $50M

> Jul 12, 2011 - Series B - $20M

> Nov 25, 2009 - Series A - $2.1M

> Jun 1, 2009 - Non Equity Assistance - ?

Seems like their rounds of fundings are slowing down.

There were also rumors of a $3.5B IPO.

I wonder if the founders still have a majority stake in the company.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudflare](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudflare)

~~~
lquist
Many startups that raised in 2015 did so at very high valuations and either
never were able to raise again or took some time to meet the lofty
expectations set by 2015 prices

------
partiallypro
I'm still waiting on this "Bandwidth Alliance" pricing. I'm on Azure and have
seen no downtick in my bandwidth bill, though we use Cloudflare pretty much
exclusively.

------
diafygi
Doesn't raising this kind of money scream that you're eventually going to
start to monetize the data flowing through your network (e.g. telecoms selling
location data to bounty hunters)?

~~~
jgrahamc
No.

To go into more detail: no. We make our money by selling our service to our
customers.

~~~
adventured
While you're on this thread... some quick feedback.

I'm a fan of your registrar service. I started experimenting with it not long
ago and have begun moving most of my domains over. I understand it's still
early days there. Any chance you could build up & clean up the billing
reporting and controls for domains (separating it out better, making it easier
to view just domain billing information & renewal info)? It's a bit haphazard
currently. It would also be very nice to be able to register domains further
out than a year (right now it's just a basic one year autorenewal on/off) -
even if that offering cost extra per year to push the duration out. I'd guess
the issue on wholesaling and allowing longer renewals, is that if the price
goes up on you in the meantime, you can't pass that along (no buffer / profit
margin built-in); so throw a reasonable fee on top for pushing the renewal
out. As it is, I've been adding years on my existing registrar, before I move
domains over to Cloudflare. Why do I want the longer duration? Peace of mind,
instead of renewing every year. Not having to worry about domains expiring is
a mental positive.

~~~
jgrahamc
Yep. I understand. Billing has been a frustration around Cloudflare Registrar.
We are working on it. Stay tuned and sorry for the frustrations.

------
auslander
Found a CDN comparison page with a repo on github. Strange no Cloudflare in
the table.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367675)

~~~
snek
Perhaps this is because CF doesn't actually provide a location to host random
files. When people say CF is a CDN, they're talking about its caches. You
still need your own server. (although they seem to be pushing dedicated
workers @ [https://workers.dev](https://workers.dev))

~~~
judge2020
FYI that workers are already available, they just currently require a domain
on CF [https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-
workers/](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-workers/)

------
Lorin
Wish they would fix integrations with 3rd party hosts - Dreamhost integration
has been broken for over 5 years.

------
lallysingh
... so, what's the money for? I assume they're already profitable...

~~~
giancarlostoro
Investing so you can make more money? Even Microsoft has raised money to be
reinvested, and they've been profitable for decades.

[https://thinkgrowth.org/why-you-should-raise-money-when-
you-...](https://thinkgrowth.org/why-you-should-raise-money-when-you-dont-
need-to-365df0ad867d)

~~~
lallysingh
Well yeah, I figured that they wanted to spend the money on something for
their business to make /more/ profit. But what?

Edit: (at least) part of the answer is listed by jasoncartwright above.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I'm just speculating but cloud hosting might be their next big leap if they go
that route? They've already got a domain registrar and other interesting
services.

~~~
jgrahamc
I doubt that. But we do have a very large network that keeps expanding and
expanding...

~~~
giancarlostoro
Maybe not yet, but I could see you guys going that route. Digital Ocean used
to only be VPS' now they've got plenty of other offerings. You're still in a
good business regardless.

------
shok3001
Ironically this page timed out when I clicked the link.

------
orliesaurus
Meanwhile I am still waiting for a free tier on the serverless workers [1]
stuff they've been advertising whole of the last year. There is no real reason
in paying $5/month for 10M requests when you can't even get accustomed or do a
proof of concept beforehand.

[1] [https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/how-
workers-...](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/how-workers-
work/)

~~~
kasey_junk
Respectfully if you can’t afford the $5 you shouldn’t be wasting dev time on a
POC. And further you are signaling to cloudflare that you would be a terrible
customer.

If I were them I’d raise the price tier.

~~~
jgrahamc
For some people $5 is a lot of money. I sympathize.

~~~
amrx431
Not every one is paid in $. There are devs who live in countries with
currencies that have lower value when compared to $.

~~~
mises
Dollars are the international reserve currency, like it or not (and believe
me, Russia and China don't and are trying to change it). But for now, that
means dollars are the most convenient form for buyers and sellers, typically.

Also, if the currency is of lower value, they get paid more. Example being the
English pound is of a higher denomination than a dollar, but whether it's
"worth more" is dictated by purchasing power, relative movement over time,
etc.

