Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet.
Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks. Today, businesses, non-profits, bloggers, and anyone with an Internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare.
How it works?
In the early days of the Internet, when you wanted to load a website, your request would go from your computer to a server, which would then return the web page you requested.
If too many requests came in at once, that server could be overwhelmed and crash, becoming unresponsive to anyone trying to access the resources it hosted.
This made it difficult for owners of Internet properties to provide content that was fast, safe, and reliable. Cloudflare was created to ease these difficulties and empower users with the resources to make their sites, apps, and blogs safe and performant. This is done through the use of a powerful edge network that provides content and other services as close to you as possible, so you get the information as fast as possible.
How Cloudflare differs from Other CDN?
Content delivery network or CDN is a lot different from Cloudflare in the sense that CDN mirror the complete site from a particular domain/subdomain/subfolder. You can use alternative mirrored CDN url to serve the static content from the CDN.
Once you are serving static content from a separate cookieless subdomain, the browser doesn’t need to send extra header information for the static content reducing the packet size of to and fro data transfer speeding up the site’s loading time.
Advantages of Cloudflare
Free
Cloudflare is entirely free to get started, whereas other CDN services cost money. Cloudfront by Amazon’s pay as you go option, but still it costs money to use their services.
Performance Improvement
As the site traffic is filtered, only genuine traffic passes. So the hosting resources can serve actual users at a better speed. Moreover, Cloudflare also caches the static content and helps them without requesting each time from the host. So the host needs lesser processing to serve the content.
Save Hosting Bandwidth
Not all the traffic goes to host. So one can save on the bandwidth that you may waste otherwise to spammers and hackers. Moreover, static content served as cached from Cloudflare will save on the hosting bandwidth as well.
Spam Protection
One can filter out the bad traffic and protect the hosting or servers from automated bots and spammers.
Accurate Site Analytics
Google Analytics or any other analytics that you may use in HTML relies on the fact users have JavaScript enabled, and the page loads to the point where you have the tracking code. With Cloudflare, stats are way more accurate than JavaScript-based stats because they catch all the traffic stats that JavaScript may miss because of blocked JavaScript content or page not loaded completely.
DNS Changes are faster
Cloudflare controls your DNS. So when changing hosts, at the most you need to do is change the IP address your old host to the new host. It can complete in minutes instead of 24 to 48 hours one typically may need to wait for DNS changes to propagate.
Blocks DoS and DDoS
Cloudflare blocks DDoS and DoS.
DDoS is an attack on the server to send too many automated requests from various locations to bring it down.
If your IP Address is known to the hacker, Cloudflare cannot protect your server from DDoS as the attacker targets IP directly bypassing the Cloudflare. The solution is to change the IP address and use the new IP address only in Cloudflare.
