Dcard

Cloudflare solutions amplify speed and protect Dcard’s global community platform against attacks

Founded in 2011, Dcard is the largest next-generation social media platform in Taiwan with 6 million registered members and 18 million unique monthly visitors. In addition to community services, Dcard is expanding into new services like ecommerce and IP and audio-visual production, and extending community services to markets like Hong Kong and Japan.

Challenge: Guarantee platform security, increase access speed overseas, and maximize development flexibility

Dcard is a popular social platform in Taiwan, with a primarily young user base. Its website provides almost 500 discussion cards with in-depth and diverse content. In addition to cards focused on topics that young people care about, Dcard users also post about interpersonal relationships, emotions and moods. Its other cards include topics such as work, workplaces, stocks, wealth management, and other self-help and growth-related content. Dcard was originally a social networking platform exclusively for college students. Recently, the site opened registration to non-college users as well as people in other regions, including Hong Kong and Japan. Since then, the number of non-college students on Dcard has reached more than 50%.

Dcard anonymizes users, allowing them to communicate freely on the site. When users register, they must provide an ID card or phone number. Therefore, Dcard regards security as one of its top priorities, and ensures that users’ personal information will not get leaked. Additionally, Dcard’s server was originally located in Taiwan, which slowed down response times in other regions, especially Japan and Hong Kong.

Dcard wanted to improve the security of their platform without affecting website performance. However, achieving this balance with an in-house solution is complex, so Dcard decided to look for a more flexible solution from external vendors.

Solution: Cloudflare security products create a secure social platform for Dcard users

Cloudflare’s WAF and DDoS protection along with its Rate Limiting product portfolio enable Dcard to eliminate user security concerns. Before using Cloudflare, Dcard had to investigate the individual source of suspicious requests and then set up a custom firewall. With a 100 Tbps network, Cloudflare handles peaks of up to 35 million requests per second. Cloudflare allows Dcard to automatically filter illegal traffic, detect and block attacks, protect applications, and defend against data breaches.

Ruian Huang, Backend Architect at Dcard, is responsible for the development and operation of the Dcard system. He has peace of mind thanks to Cloudflare security products, saying, “Cloudflare is Dcard's first line of defense against DDoS attacks. It automatically identifies and blocks these attacks and then sends an email to notify us.”

Cloudflare Workers provides a flexible and lightweight development environment

Before using Cloudflare, Dcard had to invest a lot of manpower and time to deal with security and speed issues. Manually setting rules on servers and adjusting settings on multiple devices was very complicated. For this reason, Dcard chose Cloudflare Workers, a serverless computing platform, to build a new application on the global Cloudflare network.

Huang explained that "Cloudflare Workers makes front-end work more flexible and reduces the complexity of back-end maintenance. We use Workers to handle a variety of complex tasks, including A/B testing and merging responses from multiple APIs."

Cloudflare scales with Dcard’s evolving performance and security needs

Dcard started using Cloudflare products in 2015, starting with the free plan. With the continuous growth of their platform, Dcard switched to a business plan in 2016 and upgraded to the Enterprise plan in 2017. As their user base grew and they expanded into new markets, Dcard found that loading speeds in Japan and Hong Kong suffered. Dcard then used the global Cloudflare edge network to speed up static and dynamic content delivery, reducing bandwidth usage by 10% and reducing response delays in overseas markets by 2 to 3 times.

Dcard’s Backend Lead, Chang Wen Lin, said, “Cloudflare’s service meets all of our needs, and it’s extremely helpful. We’re now able to use a single platform to complete all of our complicated development tasks." Dcard has also begun to try out Cloudflare Zero Trust, using the Cloudflare network to replace their traditional security perimeter. This provides teams around the world with a faster, more secure Internet. In the future, Cloudflare will continue to assist Dcard as they expand into even more new territories.