Crunchbase

Crunchbase is the world's leading provider of private company information on the internet, serving over 30 million users every month. In this video, Jager McConnell, CEO of Crunchbase, walks through how his company succeeds with Cloudflare.

Transcript: "I am Jager McConnell, CEO of Crunchbase. Crunchbase is the world's leading provider of private company information on the internet. We have over 30 million users coming to us, using us for finding their next investment, finding their next investor. Even salespeople going and finding their next opportunity all within Crunchbase.

You know, when we break a news story, when we have a new funding event happening that's a big deal, tons of traffic comes into Crunchbase. And those are the most critical times for us to stay up. If we go down, our users would be disappointed. They would go find that news somewhere else. And that's when we honestly rely on Cloudflare at the most.

I don't have the bandwidth or the headcount to go and have a huge team trying to keep our servers up all the time, trying to mitigate those attacks. And that's when you go and turn to a vendor to go and say, "Look, this is your core competency. Please do that for us because you're gonna do better than we can."

From the CDN perspective, 92% of our traffic goes to the CDN servers. So they don't actually touch our origin servers. It's pretty amazing. That means that when those spikes happen, the traffic is distributed across that entire network of servers. Which not only saves us bandwidth and that ultimately saves us cost, but also from an end user perspective, things are super fast, and that makes them happy.

Cloudflare allows us to go and look like we have a huge international presence by having over 330 different data centers worldwide. We go and essentially push our data out to those sort of edge servers. And that allows from our end user perspective to have a faster experience because the servers are right next to them, right? So there are very few hops. So even though they're in Australia or in Asia, they have an incredible experience using Crunchbase because of that CDN.

The most critical thing is that they can rely on us. They know that when they go to Crunchbase.com, they find the thing that they expect in having that server up and running. Cloudflare lets us deliver on that promise that expectation that the user has by being up and running.

So when you are a large website, you have a huge target on your back. So Cloudflare helps us go and mitigate that risk with their DDoS mitigation, with their WAF protection. Just last month, we had over 1,600 different attacks.

You know, it's funny; lots of people crawl us, as you might imagine. Like, when we're a data set, people go and try to find or get our information in whatever way they can. But what's funny is that sometimes, they're not the best coders when they try to go and write those crawlers.

So what it actually becomes a DDoS attack where it's one IP trying to just get as much information on the same page over and over and over, millions and millions of requests. And they don't even probably intend to be doing that. We see those sorts of attacks all the time. And that's, again, where Cloudflare can step in and just make sure that doesn't happen.

And that is an important thing for us from a security standpoint. Obviously with all of these hackers trying to do ransomware and trying to take down our servers, having the Cloudflare protection there ensures that we are safe and honestly, I think the hackers just go somewhere else when they see Cloudflare protecting our servers."