CloudFlare began as a solution called Project Honey Pot, created by Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway. It was a result of giving websites the ability to track how spammers were able to harvest email addresses.
While thousands of websites participated in Project Honey Pot, what was missing was how to actually prevent this malicious behavior, not just keep track of it. In 2009, Matthew was getting his MBA at Harvard Business School when he met Michelle Zatlyn. They decide to work together to see if they could in fact prevent that malicious behavior. Since they were pretty much creating a “firewall in the cloud”, they decided to call the project CloudFlare. Prince, Lee and Zatlyn began to build a CloudFlare team with the main goal being to help build an improved internet.
The main issue that the new CloudFlare team was running into was that while CloudFlare would help make websites safer, the solution would cause latency and ultimately slow down site performance. However, through a beta test, CloudFlare learned that with the combination of caching static resources and blocking junk/malicious traffic, websites began to perform up to 30% faster compared to sites who were not using CloudFlare.