DreamHost has announced a partnership with leading Internet web performance and security company, CloudFlare. DreamHost customers now have immediate access to CloudFlare’s robust infrastructure at little or no cost as a standard feature of their hosting plans.
Shared web hosting customers, for many years, have rarely been able to take advantage of the benefits provided by Content Delivery Networks as a result of either the cost or complexity involved. CloudFlare has removed both barriers to entry by distilling the entire setup and configuration process down to a single checkbox and removing the cost entirely. CloudFlare brings the performance and security tools previously available only to Internet giants to anyone with a website.
Hundreds of nodes around the globe power CloudFlare’s network ensuring that websites load quickly and consistently, regardless of where in the world users happen to be. CloudFlare’s Anycast technology works with static and dynamic sites, routing users to the node on their network for the fastest performance — all without breaking a sweat!
CloudFlare’s “Always Online” technology ensures that sites taking advantage of the CloudFlare platform will remain online, continuing to serve cached content, even if the hosting servers on which they are housed become temporarily unreachable. If the hosting industry had a holy grail, it might look a little something like CloudFlare.
In addition to CloudFlare’s free offering, DreamHost has also worked with the CloudFlare team to create “CloudFlare Plus,” a bundling of CloudFlare’s most popular features available exclusively to DreamHost customers. CloudFlare Plus is an optional paid upgrade, weighing in at $9.95 per month, and adds automatic image optimization and support for Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connections. Provisioning of either option has been integrated within the DreamHost customer control panel.
“When we first met with the CloudFlare team at HostingCon 2011 we had no idea if what they were telling us was true,” said Kathy Brahm, DreamHost’s Vice President of Customer Experience and Partnerships. “You know how typical sales people can be — schmoozy, smiley, ‘Let-me-buy-you-dinnery,’ handsy… all the while making outrageous claims about their product. CloudFlare’s team has been the complete opposite of those — and a true pleasure to deal with. We’ve spent the past few weeks putting CloudFlare through its paces and running some tests of our own. Some of us nearly fainted when the first speed tests came back. One guy cried. Me? I buried my feelings deep inside so I don’t have to deal with them. It’s just what I do.”
“From days of long ago, from uncharted regions of the web, comes a legend; the legend of CloudFlare, Defender of the Interwebs: a mighty robot, loved by good, feared by evil,” explains Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, doing his best Peter Cullen impersonation. “As CloudFlare’s legend grew, peace settled across the network. From Los Angeles, an Interweb Alliance was lead by DreamHost. Together with other good hosts of the network, DreamHost helped maintain peace throughout the Interwebs, until a new horrible menace threatened. A closer relationship with CloudFlare was needed. This is the story of the super force of web explorers, specially trained by DreamHost, to more tightly integrate CloudFlare, Defender of the Interwebs!”
About DreamHost
DreamHost is a leading web hosting and cloud services provider with over 300,000 customers and 1.2 million domain names hosted worldwide. The company offers a wide spectrum of web hosting and cloud solutions including traditional Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, and Domain Name Registration. DreamHost is the principal sponsor of the Ceph open-source distributed storage system.
About CloudFlare
CloudFlare, Inc. makes sites twice as fast, protects them from attacks, ensures they are always online, and makes it simple to add web apps with a single click. CloudFlare supercharges websites regardless of size or platform with no need to add hardware, install software, or change a line of code. The CloudFlare community gets stronger as it grows; every new site makes the network smarter. Thanks to our awesome sauce technology, every month a half a billion people experience a faster, safer, better Internet. CloudFlare is recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer and was named the 2011 Most Innovative Network & Internet Technology Company of the Year by the Wall Street Journal. CloudFlare is based in San Francisco, California, USA.