If you have a website hosted with us, you’ll know that we use Cloudflare’s content delivery network for better DDoS protection, SSL certificates, IP protection, speed optimisation, and for its benefits as a proxy server.
Have I lost you yet? Let's break down what that means:
Let’s picture this:
You do a Google search and click on a website. It loads quickly. Great! That’s because the website is hosted on a server in Sydney (which isn’t too far from you!).
Now, you do another search and click on a different website. It loads slowly. That’s because it’s hosted on a server in New York (which is far away from you). Now you’re sad and wishing there was a way to see global websites quickly…
That’s where Cloudflare comes in.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network that has local servers all over the world. It acts as a ‘reverse proxy server’, sitting in between a website’s DNS and web server to make internet applications lightning fast and protect them from attacks. This also means that users are delivered a local copy of the website, removing the risk of a slow load from the actual web server.
From mobile performance to regional networking route optimisations and intrusion detection to DDoS protection, Cloudflare has a number of key benefits:
Gone are the days of website domains pointing directly to the server.
Cloudflare protects millions of web properties and serves tens of millions of HTTP requests per second on average.
As a ‘reverse proxy server’, Cloudflare sits between the DNS and the web server to filter out illegitimate requests and block the web server from accessing your DNS directly. It never discloses your server’s actual address, making you far more protected from malicious attacks.
Some of its security features include:
Machine learning
With unmatched visibility into threats, Cloudflare uses machine learning to continuously improve and understand what is and isn’t a real threat.
Easy security
Behind the scenes, Cloudflare learns about your site and automatically tunes protection to your particular needs.
Threat reporting
Cloudflare shows you the list of threats that have been stopped from reaching your website. You can sort and see threats by type, country origin, and severity.
Browser integrity
Cloudflare automatically performs browser integrity checks for all requests to your website (and denies accordingly) by evaluating the HTTP headers for threat signatures.
Visitor reputation
Using threat data from numerous sources to build a reputation for each site visitor to stop a threat before it reaches your website and saving your site’s bandwidth and resources for genuine traffic.
Cloudflare also includes free SSL certificates for all of its sites, avoiding browser security warnings and search engine deprioritisation.
Cloudflare uses its network of servers across the globe to ensure that its websites are delivered quickly via local networks no matter where your site visitors are.
It also intelligently caches your site’s pages, enabling unchanged pages to load instantly so new pages can perform just as fast.
And, as mentioned above, by stopping security threats before they reach your website, Cloudflare saves your site’s bandwidth and resources for genuine traffic.
With Cloudflare, site requests are, on average, fewer than 10 hops and take less than 30ms—in layman's terms, that’s fast!
The result? Your website gains a global presence on an affordable budget.
The best part about Cloudflare:
it’s free.
Or, for advanced speed, performance, and security, you can pay a little bit extra to receive a whole lot more.
