CloudFlare is poised to change the game once again, providing webmasters with a powerful tool that can speed up existing sites, make them more secure and even keep sites alive when their server goes down.
Best of all, it is completely free and requires no installation, just a modification to one’s DNS settings.
How CloudFlare Works
Once you sign up for an account with CloudFlare, you then are instructed to change your site’s DNS settings to point to CloudFlare’s servers rather than your own. Setup usually takes less than five minutes though there can be a 24-hour delay while the DNS changes propagate out.
Once they do, visitors will be directed to CloudFlare when they type in your domain. CloudFlare will then receive their traffic, serve what content they can from their content delivery network (IE: Images, JavaScript files, CSS files, etc.) and then pull from your server any data they can’t cache, such as your main content.
CloudFlare also has the ability to detect malicious users visiting your site and either issue challenges to them or, in many cases, outright block them. This can help reduce the number of attackers or spammers who have access to your site.
All in all, CloudFlare makes itself a gateway to your site uses that position as an opportunity to speed up content delivery and keep bad guys out, a win-win for webmasters.
The Benefits of CloudFlare
Once running on your site, CloudFlare has a series of benefits that make it a compelling solution.
Speed Improvement: By taking advantage of its CDN for delivering static content, it can speed up sites dramatically, often cutting loading time in half.
Reduce Server Load: Since CloudFlare handles many of the user requests, the actual server does much less work, taking a great deal of the load off of it.
Improve Security: By filtering out known attacks, CloudFlare makes a site more secure.
Advanced Statistics: CloudFlare also has a powerful statistics package that can be even more accurate than traditional ones since it is not JavaScript based.
Backup: If your site should go down, any recently-accessed pages can be cached by CloudFlare, at least allowing your visitors to see a static version of your content.
All in all, considering that CloudFlare, for a basic account, is free, it can be a very compelling and powerful service to use. Besides, even if CloudFlare does have a problem, it merely redirects the traffic from its servers to yours, making as if it was never there at all.
Basic vs. Pro
As powerful as CloudFlare’s basic, free account is, it does offer a “Pro” one for $20 per month.
The pro account offers the same features as the free one but the pro account ads more advanced security, more frequently-updated statistics and a website preloader that loads popular pages into the user’s cache after they first arrive, making subsequent page loads even faster.
Additional pro features are promised in the future as CloudFlare is, at this time, still technically a beta product.
