Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway formed CloudFlare in 2009. While Cloudflare began as a project to deter spammers from obtaining email addresses on websites, the focus of the business changed to offering network protection solutions in 2009.
Over time, the designers of CloudFlare discovered that one of the variables behind poor site efficiency was security tools. This inspired the development team to find ways to boost site efficiency while ensuring good Internet security at the same time.
The Content Distribution Network, domain hosting, and online security tool that we all know as CloudFlare was born in this way.