CloudFlare is a website security company that provides content delivery network and DDoS mitigation services with a mission to “build a better internet” That is a great reason to use them, right out of the gate.
The internet is a big, ever evolving place with lots of dark corners, it can be intimidating. CloudFlare makes the big world of the Internet a little smaller with lots of servers all functioning together to create ease of access and faster pages and apps for businesses and users like you. CloudFlare also helps to make your sites more secure from threats like DDoS attacks and malware.
CloudFlare’s Network
The main advantage of CloudFlare is its immense network. CloudFlare has a presence in over 193 cities across the world and approximately 20 million Internet properties within their network. When you use CloudFlare you connect your hosted website to CloudFlare services through CloudFlare’s control panel. Once your site is connected, CloudFlare caches segments of your website across its locations, allowing your users to gain access and retrieve information more quickly. CloudFlare also helps to monitor your site’s access and restrict malicious actors and actions against your site.
CloudFlare’s Security Advantage
CloudFlare allows users to customize their firewall settings, and monitors data as it passes through their servers. CloudFlare will monitor IP addresses, as well as the frequency of requests. CloudFlare also provides DNS security via the CloudFlare server. CloudFlare thus provides an extra layer of security from DDoS, DNS, and other malicious interference attempts.
Speed and Distribution
Because of the immense coverage provided by CloudFlare’s CDN, CloudFlare can help to increase your site’s speed, and decrease your bandwidth. Once data reaches a certain speed, the only way to make it faster is to reduce the distance between two points. By spreading your site to further reaches via distributed remote caching, CloudFlare is creating a closer version of your site throughout the world. Fetching your site data becomes a “local delivery” as opposed to “international.” This availability of site info will help to increase your site’s responsiveness and load times, which will also increase its SEO and rankings. In order to increase the bandwidth benefits, consider which elements of your site are “static” and unlikely to change. These are the easily cached elements for CloudFlare’s network.
Dependability and Redundancy
With each location where your site is cached, you gain another link in the network. If there are any problems with a cached location, your site is only as far away as the next node. Using CloudFlare as part of your toolkit helps your site run more efficiently, and can decrease your resource usage.
CanSpace is a CloudFlare premium partner. Along with your website hosting services, 24/7 monitoring, and fast customer support response times, you can also enjoy the more powerful tools CloudFlare has to offer. CloudFlare is available free of charge to all CanSpace clients, and all of our hosting plans are directly compatible with CloudFlare services.
We love CloudFlare’s services and we think you will too. Once you are logged into CloudFlare on your site you will be able to check what percentage of your site is cached and other analytics on user visits. CloudFlare has tabs for Speed, Caching, Firewall, DNS, and analytics. CloudFlare essentially gives you a second level control panel for your site with an intuitive layout to adjust.
If you have any questions about your site, how to use CloudFlare, or what CanSpace can do for your site, don’t hesitate to reach out.
