CrazyGames

CrazyGames scales to 50 million monthly users and a global top 500 ranking using Cloudflare

CrazyGames was built on a simple belief that great games should be playable instantly by anyone, anywhere, directly in the browser. Today, that vision has grown into one of the internet’s most visited gaming destinations, reaching 50 million monthly users worldwide and ranking among the top 500 websites globally according to Similarweb.

With thousands of games spanning every genre, from Mahjong to Puzzle, CrazyGames has become a trusted destination for instant-play gaming and one of the leading platforms for developers publishing web games to a global audience.

Challenge: Growing fast without a security foundation

When CrazyGames was small, no attackers threatened the company. That changed as the platform grew and became one of the most recognizable gaming sites on the web. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks became frequent. Without any dedicated security tooling in place, some of those attacks got through, occasionally taking down the database and disrupting the experience for users. "No one's going to attack a super small random website like we were at the start," says Raf Mertens, CEO and co-founder of CrazyGames. "But now a lot of our users are like, ‘I want to be cool and let me try to take down this site all my friends use.’"

The team needed something that could handle security and performance at scale without requiring a dedicated team to run it. Application performance and security were the starting points for their Cloudflare adoption, and the platform has been core to CrazyGames' infrastructure ever since.

Stopping 25 million threats a month without human intervention

Today, Cloudflare mitigates 25 million threats targeting CrazyGames every month. That protection helps CrazyGames remain a safe and secure destination for millions of players, families, advertisers, and developers worldwide. For the team, that protection represents something more valuable than blocked attacks. It represents engineering capacity that never had to be spent.

Before Cloudflare, DDoS attacks occasionally resulted in application downtime. That has not happened in a long time. The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides exploit protection, with new threats addressed within 24 hours. Because the platform handles defenses automatically, the team does not have to think about how different components interact or whether firewall rules are conflicting with proxy settings.

"WAF just works and you don't have to think about how the reverse proxy network settings interact with the firewalls," says Mertens. "It's nicely integrated, which is very handy." For a 50-person team running a platform at the scale of a top 500 global website, that integration is not a nice-to-have. It is what makes the whole operation possible.

Delivering games reliably to a global audience with CDN and DNS

Robust, reliable performance is not optional when you are delivering browser-based games to users across every continent. Every title is a meaningful payload, and users expect them to load fast regardless of where they are connecting from. That reliability is also critical for partners and advertisers, helping CrazyGames maintain some of the highest quality ad inventory in browser gaming. Cloudflare CDN and DNS infrastructure handle global delivery and routing, ensuring users reach the platform quickly and reliably at scale.

The platform's growth from the top 1,000 most visited websites in the world to the top 500 is a direct reflection of that delivery capability. Serving that volume of users, at that level of consistency, with a small in-house team requires infrastructure that handles scale automatically and does not demand constant tuning or manual intervention.

"Cloudflare has helped us scale," says Mertens. "We hardly have to think or worry about the delivery of our platform and games."

Delivering more dynamic experiences at the edge with Cloudflare Workers and Images

For most of CrazyGames' history, every user saw the same page. That worked when the platform was simpler, but as the product evolved and the team wanted to deliver more personalized experiences, a static approach stopped making sense. About two years ago, CrazyGames started using Cloudflare Workers more actively to solve that problem.

Workers made it straightforward to differentiate, serving different variations of the website and different flavors of the platform without adding backend complexity. Logic that would otherwise have required dedicated backend services now runs on Workers, across 330+ cities globally, without the team managing regional configuration or scaling infrastructure.

Cloudflare Images handles image management and optimization across the platform, reducing the operational overhead that comes with managing and transforming a large and growing library of visual content at scale.

"You can just enable Cloudflare Images, and it gives you a ton of features and optimizations and security without you having to understand all of it," says Mertens. "The default settings are very good, and a lot of it is hidden from you, but you don't need to know. Especially if you're a small team and you don't want to worry about it."

What’s next: Expanding storage capabilities and continuing to grow on Cloudflare

CrazyGames has been a Cloudflare customer for almost 10 years. The relationship has grown alongside the platform, most recently expanding to include more Cloudflare Workers capacity as the team found more use cases for serverless execution. Looking ahead, the CrazyGames team is considering Cloudflare R2 object storage as their storage needs grow with the platform.

"Cloudflare is reliable, incredibly easy to set up, and it scales with you however big you can grow," says Mertens. "Anyone who has a small website but they're starting to see traction, I would say use Cloudflare, enable it, and you don't have to think about it for three years. And then if you're really big, Cloudflare is still good."