this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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What matters is really how many of the most popular web sites are behind it. The large massive ones with lots of traffic are likely to use it.
Not really, Cloudflare is popular among common people due to their free services. Enterprise is more about AWS and Azure because their servers are already there.
Edit. Btw 20% is Cloudflare's own claim.
Well, i checked. From the top 1000 websites in the world, cloudflare is fronting 55% of them.
Same with top 10000 websites, 55%.
Top 100000 websites, 52%.
All measured websites, 29%.
I think this is telling a different story than small sites using free cloudflare services. The 20% that cloudflare says is most similar to "all measured websites" where tons of small ones are included.
That's interesting.
Cloudflare says on their homepage "Everything we learned from powering 20% of the Internet". But I wonder what they mean by 20% of the Internet, is it about sites or traffic?
They also say "Cloudflare powers 45% of the Fortune 500" which correlates with your numbers.
So 29% websites, 20% traffic and 45% of F500 seems reasonable, where other 71% is shared between AWS, Azure, smaller CDNs and those brave people not using CDNs at all.
The other poster also shared a link where stats seems similar for CF(~1/3) https://trends.builtwith.com/cdn
Still very far from "the entire world" claim in OP.
Something like 40% of the top 100k sites use Cloudflare. Builtwith says 44%: https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Cloudflare/High-Traffic-Volume
The pricing on their paid plans is very competitive. For small to medium sites, it's orders of magnitude cheaper than Akamai. The WAF and DDoS protection is pretty good too.
The largest sites like Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc have their own CDNs, including servers they provide to large ISPs for free since it significantly reduces upstream bandwidth usage (Netflix call this Open Connect; Meta's is Facebook/Meta Network Appliance). Outside of the largest sites, you'd be surprised how many companies rely on Cloudflare. It's kinda scary.
I suspect most of the paid Cloudflare customers are also AWS or Azure customers. Cloudflare isn't used to host big websites, but it's certainly used to defend them from DDoS attacks, which is the main feature Cloudflare offers and what is usually in use when you see the Cloudflare error page.
Cloudflare for hosting small static websites is a niche usage of it.