Below is a screenshot from the CloudFlare control panel showing exactly what did happen to GoInstant's site. We didn't know what would happen with our site when we stepped on stage," recounted Jevon MacDonald from GoInstant. "Leading up to TechCrunch Disrupt, we were super nervous. Just about every company as they get ready to launch at Disrupt has the same concern. Our toast that evening: "Please just don't let the servers melt." CloudFlare still wasn't fully working, and we all planned to work late into the night, but for a few minutes the three of us took a break to have dinner and some wine. I remember getting dinner with my co-founders Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn the night before our launch at a little Italian restaurant in SOMA called La Bricola.
It's comforting to remember that it didn't hurt them much and they went on to win their year of the competition. There are horror stories every competitor hears, like when RedBeacon, during Disrupt's predecessor TC50 event, had their site completely crash during their presentation. Doing so in front of a live, tech savvy audience of 3,000, not to mention untold numbers of people watching via the live stream, is nerve wracking.
For companies that do make the finals, traffic can reach hundreds of requests per second during the time you are on stage and when the winners are announced.The largest spike for most companies occurs when TechCrunch publishes the article about your company (usually shortly after you're on stage). Traffic builds over all three days of the competition, even if you don't make the finals.If you effectively leverage social media, you can use the Disrupt audience to further amplify the traffic to your site.If you have a consumer appeal you can expect to get more traffic than if you are business or enterprise focused.For the average company that doesn't make the finals, expect between 10,000 - 20,000 page views per day during TC Disrupt, about 20% of that traffic concentrated during the hour that you're on stage.Over the three days at TC Disrupt, expect your site to get an average of a 3x to 10x surge in traffic.While the exact numbers vary, here's what happens to their websites: To get a sense of what Battlefield companies can expect, we aggregated the log data of 20 companies that were on CloudFlare's network when they launched. They agreed to let me tell a bit about their experience and share details from their traffic logs in order to prepare companies in the Battlefield for what to expect. Their sites were also all on CloudFlare for the launch, so we have the actual log data on what their servers saw. Tony Gauda, CEO of Bitcasa (Battlefield Finalist), Rebecca Woodcock, CEO of CakeHealth (Battlefield Finalist), and Jevon MacDonald CEO of GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce) were all standouts from last year's competition.
By our count, we've helped about 25% of the Battlefield companies over the last two years ensure their sites stay online even under the crushing load a Disrupt launch brings.Īs Disrupt San Francisco 2012 gets started, I thought it would be cool to reach out to some of the standout companies that launched a year ago in order to give you a behind the scenes peek at what it's like to launch there. And, if launching at Disrupt does one thing, it's deliver a huge burst of traffic. CloudFlare's bread and butter is keeping sites running fast and stable even during huge bursts in traffic. One of the most rewarding things for us has been getting to help other companies as they launched at the four Disrupt events since: New York 2011, San Francisco 2011, Beijing 2011, and New York 2012. Since then, we've rolled out 23 data centers (one per month since launch), added more than half a million customers' websites, and powered nearly half a trillion page views through the CloudFlare network. It was an incredible experience for us and we owe a significant amount of our success to the stage Disrupt provided us. CloudFlare launched almost exactly 2 years ago at the first TechCrunch Disrupt SF.