What Is Cloudflare, What Does It Do?

Cloudflare is essentially a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Cloudflare’s primary goal is to help small and large businesses secure their online presence and make it faster.

Founded in 2009 to find and eliminate the source of email spam, the company now provides DNS and security services to millions of customers. Today, it is one of the largest cloud networking platforms and over 12 million domains trust Cloudflare. It also handles about 10% of all internet traffic.

How Cloudflare Works?

Cloudflare’s strength lies in its huge server network. The network spans over 93 countries covering over 200 locations (that’s almost half of the countries in the world). They act both as data cache servers and as a firewall at scale.

Technically, if you have a hosted website, all you have to do is sign up with Cloudflare. After registration, if you add your site to dashboards, then data segments from your site will be cached on Cloudflare servers around the world.

When a visitor makes a request for your site, Cloudflare simultaneously communicates with your website and sends them cached data from the closest location. This usually allows visitors to start getting information much faster than if the request was made directly to your website.

At the same time, all data passing through Cloudflare servers is monitored. That way they can block potential attacks and filter out anything else that helps keep your site more secure.

What Are Cloudflare’s Free Features?

1. DNS hosting
DNS is responsible for translating domain names to IP addresses. Cloudflare provides DNS hosting to manage DNS records and in most cases Cloudflare records take effect very quickly.

2. CDN
Content Delivery Network is a service that caches your website, serves it from the geographically closest server to the website, and increases the loading speed of the website.

3. SSL/TLS
Cloudflare provides free SSL for domain name. You can get detailed information about SSL from our content below.

4. Firewall
Cloudflare firewall limited to 5 rules; It provides a way to block traffic using IP address, hostname, known bots, URI and more. You can get detailed information about Firewall from our content below.

5. Page rules
Page rules are limited to 3 rules. It provides different functionality like redirects, HTTPS rewrites and more.

6. Applications
Cloudflare apps created by developers provide different functionality with just one click.

7. Analytics
Cloudflare analytics provides simple analytics for your website.

What are the Advantages of Using Cloudflare?

1. Security
Cloudflare’s security features are highly respected and your site is protected by these features. Cloudflare; automatically blocks threats such as data breaches, bot attacks, and DDoS attacks. This ensures a high level of security while minimizing disruption to your site.

When your site connects to Cloudflare, the DNS system is also protected. If anyone were to search for your domain name, all they would see is the DNS set provided by Cloudflare, not your actual nameservers.

Cloudflare also allows users to configure firewalls with custom rules.

2. Speed
Speed ​​is most desired by website owners all over the world because of the way Google works. Faster websites mean higher search rankings, increased conversion rates and an overall better visitor experience.

If you have parts of your website cached on Cloudflare servers in multiple locations, every time a visitor tries to access your site, Cloudflare responds by delivering your site from the nearest cache location. This means that your site will start loading in the visitor’s browser faster than ever before.

This also means that content is delivered quickly, wherever users are in the world.

3. Downsizing
Characters such as spaces, comments, newline characters, and block delimiters are not required for a web page to be served. By eliminating these unnecessary characters and reducing the file size, the page loads faster. Cloudflare supports three file minification types: Javascript, CSS, and HTML.

4. Free SSL
Cloudflare offers recommended free SSLs for all websites. SSLs encrypt data from the user’s computer to your server. This is important for sites that send or receive data or receive payments.

Cloudflare Pricing and Plans

With around 10,000 new customers signing up every day, Cloudflare offers a free plan with good service for small sites. Depending on the requirements, there are also paid plans that offer much more advanced security features and options.

In Cloudflare pricing plans, it has four different tiers. At its most basic, it provides a free service to users. This plan is limited in some ways, but most smaller sites can enjoy many benefits, even on the free plan. Most importantly, its free plan does not impose bandwidth limitations on users.

The paid plans on Cloudflare are Pro, Business, and Enterprise. The Pro plan is $20 per month, while the Business plan with an increasing number of features is $200. Enterprise plans, on the other hand, are customizable, so users should discuss options and pricing with Cloudflare sales staff.