July 16, 2026
NSFW: Name Server Flame War
What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)
Cloudflare’s cute server names sparked laughs, eye-rolls, and a full nerd meltdown
TLDR: Cloudflare said its human-style server names like Bob and Lola were a practical fix to stop users from making setup mistakes and to tell competing signups apart. The comments instantly split into two camps: one side loved the nerdy joke, while the other called the whole thing painfully childish.
Cloudflare thought it was telling a charming little behind-the-scenes story: instead of boring labels like "server 1" and "server 2," it gave every customer two human names like Bob and Lola. The reason was surprisingly practical. Back in the early days, the company needed a quick way to tell which signup for a website was the "real" one if two people tried to claim the same site at once. Numbered names made some users get too creative, adding extra ones they weren’t supposed to, so Cloudflare switched to random first names to stop the confusion. Cute, right? Well, the comments section had thoughts.
Some readers were delighted by the age-old nerd struggle of naming things, with one cracking that this is basically computer science finally tackling its most cursed problem. Another instantly summoned the eternal internet reflex: "As always" and a link to that classic XKCD comic about naming disasters. But the real drama came from the anti-whimsy crowd, who were absolutely not in the mood for ninja mascots and personality-filled servers. One commenter blasted the whole thing as "so cringe," comparing engineers to "overgrown toddlers stuck in kindergarten." Ouch. Others begged for cold, joyless strings of letters and numbers instead: no Bob, no Lola, no ninja art, just machine labels and move on.
So yes, this started as a story about server names. It ended as a miniature culture war between people who think tech should have a little personality and people who want every trace of fun launched directly into the sun.
Key Points
- •Cloudflare assigned each new customer two nameserver hostnames during signup and pushed DNS records to its edge network so domains could switch with little or no downtime.
- •The company needed a way to resolve conflicts when two people signed up the same domain at the same time and submitted different DNS records.
- •Cloudflare's initial system used numbered nameservers, pairing values like dns7 and dns23 to encode a unique combination tied to a signup.
- •Users sometimes added extra sequential numbered nameservers on their own, which gave no operational benefit and could cause Cloudflare's verification process to fail.
- •To reduce that behavior, Cloudflare replaced obvious numbered sequences with 100 short personal names, producing 2,500 possible nameserver pairs and later commissioned ninja-themed artwork for them.