A bit more about this as I’m remembering. Cloudflare’s original “data center” (which was really just a single server) was located in Chicago. We had the zip/postal code for Project Honey Pot participants from when they signed up so we emailed anyone within a certain radius around Chicago to be our first beta testers. We knew they were the folks most likely to have acceptable performance.

The original way you signed up for Cloudflare was to give us your GoDaddy username and password and we’d login, slurp the DNS records, then update the name servers. It was magic when it worked. But it was almost too easy so if something broke people didn’t know how to undo what we’d done. Worse: sometimes we’d miss a DNS record like an MX record and be unable to even contact the user.

The crazy thing is we emailed people basically with the content on this page and asking Project Honey Pot users to give us their user names and password. A scary number of people just did without asking any questions.

We put this page up to prove this was a legitimate project after a (scary) few people asked us: “How do I know this isn’t phishing??”

Fun to find it still kicking around 12+ years later.