Have you ever come up with the idea of using Cloudflare for your website? How does it work? When is it a good idea to use Cloudflare? Well, there might be some confusion regarding the whole matter. Why not find out more about Cloudflare and then consider all these questions?
Cloudflare is a content delivery network. It becomes an intermediate service between the actual hosting provider and the user who is browsing the website with your domain name. When a user tries to check your website by entering your domain name, Cloudflare will check if the user is real. It will then fetch the content for you corresponding to that domain name by referencing the proper IP address.
Now, how does Cloudflare work?
If you use Cloudflare DNS, it will pass all the traffic coming to your server through a filter. Only the traffic that is validated will continue to your website. Cloudflare gives the flexibility to have different security levels. It will allow you to decide whom you would like to term as spammers or hackers, and you would be able to filter them out.
How is Cloudflare different from other CDNs?
Even though Cloudflare is termed as a content delivery network, it is very different from the others. The job of a CDN is to mirror the website from a particular domain, subdomain, or subfolder. You can even serve static content from the CDN through a mirrored CDN URL.
When you are sending static content from a subdomain without cookies, there is no need to send extra header information by the browser for this static content. This brings down the packet size of the data transfer, leading to increased speeds and low website loading times. The browser can also download static content from different URLs. Also, the content would generally be served from the nearest location. In a nutshell, the primary focus of CDN is to speed up the loading time of the website.
You can enable Cloudflare if you would like to filter your traffic and keep unwanted access from your hosted websites.
Benefits of using Cloudflare
Let us take a look at the reasons why you might want to use Cloudflare DNS.
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You get to use it for free
As you get started, Cloudflare is offered to you for free. You will need to shell out money to use other CDN.
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You get better performance
Only genuine traffic passes to the website as the site is filtered. The hosting resources will be able to serve the real users at a much better speed. Cloudflare will even cache the static content. This means that the host will not be requested for the same information every time. This also stands among the useful Cloudflare features. This reduces the processing required to serve content.
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Save the hosting bandwidth
Not all the traffic will go to the host. This means you will not be wasting your bandwidth on hackers and spammers. This also means that static content that is cached through Cloudflare will also help to save the hosting bandwidth.
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Protect against spam
This allows the users to filter out the bad traffic. It protects the servers and hosts from spammers and automated bots.
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You will get accurate website analytics
You might be relying on Google Analytics and other analytics that you might be used in HTML. It relies on the fact that the users will have Javascript-enabled. Your page will also need to load the tracking code. However, with Cloudflare, the statistics are much more accurate than what you could achieve through stats based on JavaScript. This is because JavaScript might be blocked on the website, which is not the case with Cloudflare. Unlike JavaScript, Cloudflare analytics will not fail due to incomplete loading.
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You will get faster changes on your DNS
Your DNS is controlled through Cloudflare. When you are changing hosts, all you would need to do is change your IP address from your old host to your new host. This process usually takes 24 to 72 hours. This is because you would need the DNS changes to propagate throughout the globe. With Cloudflare, this happens within minutes.
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Cloudflare blocks DDoS and DoS
DDoS is a type of attack where a lot of automated requests are sent to the server from various locations in order to bring it down. Cloudflare cannot protect your server from DDoS if your IP address is known to the hacker. The attacker will be able to target the IP Address bypassing Cloudflare. The solution here is to change the IP address and use the new IP address in Cloudflare. It is a good idea to use Cloudflare if a lot of DDoS attacks are directed towards the website.
There are a lot of benefits to using Cloudflare. If these reasons are enough for you to switch to Cloudflare, you can check out how it can improve your website performance and protect against vulnerabilities.
