Not really, Cloudflare is popular among common people due to their free services. Enterprise is more about AWS and Azure because their servers are already there.
Well, i checked. From the top 1000 websites in the world, cloudflare is fronting 55% of them.
Same with top 10000 websites, 55%.
Top 100000 websites, 52%.
All measured websites, 29%.
I think this is telling a different story than small sites using free cloudflare services. The 20% that cloudflare says is most similar to “all measured websites” where tons of small ones are included.
Cloudflare says on their homepage “Everything we learned from powering 20% of the Internet”. But I wonder what they mean by 20% of the Internet, is it about sites or traffic?
They also say “Cloudflare powers 45% of the Fortune 500” which correlates with your numbers.
So 29% websites, 20% traffic and 45% of F500 seems reasonable, where other 71% is shared between AWS, Azure, smaller CDNs and those brave people not using CDNs at all.
The pricing on their paid plans is very competitive. For small to medium sites, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper than Akamai. The WAF and DDoS protection is pretty good too.
The largest sites like Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc have their own CDNs, including servers they provide to large ISPs for free since it significantly reduces upstream bandwidth usage (Netflix call this Open Connect; Meta’s is Facebook/Meta Network Appliance). Outside of the largest sites, you’d be surprised how many companies rely on Cloudflare. It’s kinda scary.
Doesn’t your link show top 100k sites that use Cloudflare? I mean it’s Home -> Trends -> Content Delivery Network -> Websites using Cloudflare -> Top 100k Sites by Traffic there.
Which is a lot more than I thought(and a lot less than the entire world), probably misunderstood CF own claim of 20% of the Internet as sites when it’s for traffic.
What surprised me is that 95% is not shared by CF, AWS(just 8% seems sus), Azure(not even in their stats), by their stats almost half of the Internet is run by smaller CDNs(if I interpret their Other correctly). To me personally it sounds way too good and suspicious, maybe there is some survivorship bias at play there.
The title of the page I linked to is “Websites using Cloudflare in the Top 100k Sites by Traffic” so I think my interpretation was correct.
Also, one domain can use multiple CDNs (eg one subdomain uses Cloudflare while another uses Bunny) so I’m not sure how their percentages work.
I’m also not sure how they count sites that use Cloudflare but not the CDN product (for example, if they disable caching and only use the WAF). That looks identical from a client side so there’s probably no way to tell.
Maybe I shouldn’t trust their data.
AWS(just 8% seems sus),
The chart wouldn’t be showing all of AWS, just Cloudfront (their CDN). There’s plenty of services that use AWS EC2 or Lightsail but front it with Cloudflare.
I suspect most of the paid Cloudflare customers are also AWS or Azure customers. Cloudflare isn’t used to host big websites, but it’s certainly used to defend them from DDoS attacks, which is the main feature Cloudflare offers and what is usually in use when you see the Cloudflare error page.
Cloudflare for hosting small static websites is a niche usage of it.
Cloudflare is just 20% of the websites, like 1/5 of the entire world.
What matters is really how many of the most popular web sites are behind it. The large massive ones with lots of traffic are likely to use it.
Not really, Cloudflare is popular among common people due to their free services. Enterprise is more about AWS and Azure because their servers are already there.
Edit. Btw 20% is Cloudflare’s own claim.
Well, i checked. From the top 1000 websites in the world, cloudflare is fronting 55% of them.
Same with top 10000 websites, 55%.
Top 100000 websites, 52%.
All measured websites, 29%.
I think this is telling a different story than small sites using free cloudflare services. The 20% that cloudflare says is most similar to “all measured websites” where tons of small ones are included.
That’s interesting.
Cloudflare says on their homepage “Everything we learned from powering 20% of the Internet”. But I wonder what they mean by 20% of the Internet, is it about sites or traffic?
They also say “Cloudflare powers 45% of the Fortune 500” which correlates with your numbers.
So 29% websites, 20% traffic and 45% of F500 seems reasonable, where other 71% is shared between AWS, Azure, smaller CDNs and those brave people not using CDNs at all.
The other poster also shared a link where stats seems similar for CF(~1/3) https://trends.builtwith.com/cdn
Still very far from “the entire world” claim in OP.
Something like 40% of the top 100k sites use Cloudflare. Builtwith says 44%: https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Cloudflare/High-Traffic-Volume
The pricing on their paid plans is very competitive. For small to medium sites, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper than Akamai. The WAF and DDoS protection is pretty good too.
The largest sites like Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc have their own CDNs, including servers they provide to large ISPs for free since it significantly reduces upstream bandwidth usage (Netflix call this Open Connect; Meta’s is Facebook/Meta Network Appliance). Outside of the largest sites, you’d be surprised how many companies rely on Cloudflare. It’s kinda scary.
Doesn’t your link show top 100k sites that use Cloudflare? I mean it’s Home -> Trends -> Content Delivery Network -> Websites using Cloudflare -> Top 100k Sites by Traffic there.
That same site says CF is ~35% https://trends.builtwith.com/cdn
Which is a lot more than I thought(and a lot less than the entire world), probably misunderstood CF own claim of 20% of the Internet as sites when it’s for traffic.
What surprised me is that 95% is not shared by CF, AWS(just 8% seems sus), Azure(not even in their stats), by their stats almost half of the Internet is run by smaller CDNs(if I interpret their Other correctly). To me personally it sounds way too good and suspicious, maybe there is some survivorship bias at play there.
The title of the page I linked to is “Websites using Cloudflare in the Top 100k Sites by Traffic” so I think my interpretation was correct.
Also, one domain can use multiple CDNs (eg one subdomain uses Cloudflare while another uses Bunny) so I’m not sure how their percentages work.
I’m also not sure how they count sites that use Cloudflare but not the CDN product (for example, if they disable caching and only use the WAF). That looks identical from a client side so there’s probably no way to tell.
Maybe I shouldn’t trust their data.
The chart wouldn’t be showing all of AWS, just Cloudfront (their CDN). There’s plenty of services that use AWS EC2 or Lightsail but front it with Cloudflare.
I suspect most of the paid Cloudflare customers are also AWS or Azure customers. Cloudflare isn’t used to host big websites, but it’s certainly used to defend them from DDoS attacks, which is the main feature Cloudflare offers and what is usually in use when you see the Cloudflare error page.
Cloudflare for hosting small static websites is a niche usage of it.