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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

I remember signing up for the beta of this service not really understanding how it worked and was pretty weirded out when it asked me to point my DNS to their server.

That's not an anti-spam product, that's hosting.

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No, it isn't hosting because you still keep your hosting provider when using CloudFlare. The DNS switch is at your registrar, which is an entirely separate issue than hosting.

Example: 1. Registrar could be GoDaddy. 2. Hosting is at BlueHost.

Adding CloudFlare would mean: 1. Change authoritative nameservers at GoDaddy to us. 2. Hosting doesn't change at BlueHost.

CloudFlare is reverse proxy. You keep your existing hosting provider. It's just like how Postini, MX Logic, or MessageLabs stopped email spam via a change to DNS.

What do you guys use for your reverse proxying? Custom software with very good on-the-fly HTML processing?

We use NGINX as our underlying platform, but have extensively extended it for our purposes. We actively contribute back to the NGINX open source community where there are developments we've made we think may be useful.

Sorry, but what/how exacly are you actively contributing? Other than yesterday's naive port of mod_pagespeed, I didn't find any of your contributions and you make it sound like something you're doing on the regular basis.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of your product from the very beginning, but don't say that you do things when you don't.

Yes, one of our engineers contributed a his work on a native port of mod_pagespeed two days ago. We have made a number of other contributions along the way as well, most of which aren't nearly as sexy as the one you pointed out. And we'll continue to do so.

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