It’s official!
As of Sept. 27th, 8:00 PM EST CloudFlare is open to the public!
For those of you that haven’t heard of CloudFlare which is understandable, they are a CDN (Content Distribution Network) on steroids.
What makes CloudFlare so unique is that not only do they cache your websites static content, resulting in faster load times, but they also protect your website from the bad guys. And they do it for Free! Yes I said FREE!
The way CloudFlare works is very simple, and only takes 5 minutes to set up.
The only change you have to make is to your domain names DNS. Change the primary and secondary name servers and you’re done! No, Really! that is all there is to it. It takes about 4 hours for your site to be cached and page load times will start dropping. You’ll see an average speed increase of 30%. Plus, an amazing drop in bandwidth usage, because CloudFlare is serving your static content along with stopping the spammers, scrapers, harvesters and other threats before they even see your site.
Don’t kid yourself! If your website has been online for more than a week or two, the bad guys know about and are trying to get in. I’ll explain that in another post.
What does CloudFlare offer?
Glad you asked! Here are few of the services they provide for free.
- Globally-distributed network
- Secure, redundant DNS
- Anycast routing technology
- Automatic static content caching
- Always online
- Email harvesting protection
- Reputation-based threat protection
- Server side exclude ability
- Hotlinking protection
- Browser integrity checks
- Threat control dashboard
- Block traffic by country or IP range
- Alert infected human visitors
- Identify new threats for community
- Easy DNS management
- Threat challenge page
- Offline browsing page
- Stats for all the traffic to your site (threats, search engine crawlers and visitors)
- Outbound Link Tracking
- Visitor IP Geolocation lookup
- Automatic Google Analytics code insertion
And that is just the FREE package!!!