GoKawiilWe're going to do a series of blog posts about some of the inner workings of CloudFlare. One of the questions we get often is what the names of our name servers mean. Here's the story.
Two Names Enter
When someone signs up for CloudFlare, we give them two domains for their name servers. For example:
bob.ns.cloudflare.com
lola.ns.cloudflare.com
So who are Bob and Lola? To understand, you have to understand a bit about a problem we were trying to solve.
Slick signup
We worked to make the sign-up process for CloudFlare as easy as possible. Typically, it takes users about 5 minutes to complete. Imagine you own example.com and want to sign up. You enter example.com on our sign-up form, we slurp your DNS records and allow you to add any we've missed, then we give you your two name servers that you enter at your registrar.
We have systems that almost instantly push your records to our DNS servers at the edge of CloudFlare's network. As a result, when you switch to our name servers at your registrar, your site will be served as normal without any downtime. In most cases, this is all easy. One problem we worried about early on was simply: what would happen if two people signed up the same domain at the same time?
Resolving Conflicts
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