Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network, or CDN. However, it is really much bigger than content delivery, offering a wide range of services.
They strive to reduce the number of unresponsive or slow web pages on the internet and generally improve the browsing experience of internet users worldwide. Cloudflare utilizes thousands of servers worldwide to provide better speed for all kinds of websites and keep them safe from hackers.
Originally, Cloudflare began as Project Honeypot, which was designed to find out where annoying email spam was coming from.
As time went on, Project Honeypot grew to defend websites against various threats rather than just tracking email spam. They also started searching for ways to make sites load faster.
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How Does Cloudflare Work?
Cloudflare depends on its network of servers to speed up websites and protect them from malicious attacks. For example, say you use wordpress web hosting. Cloudflare would serve as an extra level of protection to speed up your site and act as a firewall without interfering with the hosting or themes and while continuing to allow legitimate traffic through to view your website.
Sign up with Cloudflare using your hosted website and put your site on their system. After that, there’s not much you have to do.
Cloudflare has servers spread across more than 90 countries, enabling them to provide these services to a wide range of locations. Your site’s data is cached in various Cloudflare servers across the world. Here’s a snapshot of how it works:
- Your visitor makes a request of your site by clicking on it from a Google search, entering the URL, or clicking a link on a third-party page.
- Cloudflare sends them the data it has cached at the nearest possible location, enabling them to access your site faster than they would have been able to without Cloudflare.
- At the same time, Cloudflare communicates with your website and monitors the data moving through its servers to block attacks and filter out hackers or bots to keep your site safe.
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Cloudflare Elements
Security
With cybercrime on the rise, even prompting action from the president of the United States, it should be no surprise that bumping your website security is a priority. Using Cloudflare means that any information going into or out of your website moves through Cloudflare servers.
That means that everything is analyzed for threats by Cloudflare. Cloudflare looks at a range of information, from IP addresses, to how often requests are made, to what the request actually are.
Keep in mind that you won’t be locked into whatever Cloudflare deems appropriate. You can customize your website’s firewall within Cloudflare according to your own desired rules.
Cloudflare also protects your DNS system. When people look up your domain name, they see the DNS that Cloudflare provides rather than the name of your actual servers.
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Speed
Usually, speed is sacrificed for security, but the opposite is true when it comes to Cloudflare. Because of remote caching, Cloudflare can dramatically improve your website speed.
This is an essential element since increased speed will improve your rankings in Google. While you may think that having a US-hosted site means that your site is among the fastest worldwide, in fact, the US is slower than other major countries worldwide.
Having speed boosted wherever people access your site worldwide is invaluable. When visitors access your site, they get information from the nearest cache location, rather than having to wait for wherever your primary servers are to deliver this information.
Visitors get information quicker while Cloudflare has time to check data for security purposes. As an added benefit, you may also save some money using Cloudflare. Your site is being provided for by Cloudflare servers rather than just your servers.
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Consider Cloudflare for Your Website
Regardless of the kind of website you have, security and speed probably matter a lot to you. Cloudflare is a very efficient and safe way to improve your sight’s security and speed for a reasonable cost.