I’ve heard a few mentions of CloudFlare before, but I never gave it much attention. Today, after reading this blog post, I decided to give it a try.
What’s more, that 30-40% increase that people used to see is now in the range of at least 50-60% as the team continues to find ways to make CloudFlare faster, while still offering security at the forefront.
What is CloudFlare, you ask? As per their own website:
CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.
In simple terms: CloudFlare is very cheap (even free) content delivery network (CDN). It provides speed and security improvements, and it is extremely easy to configure. I know so, because I’ve already registered for the free account and configured this site to benefit from the service. Whether it actually lives up to all the hype – I don’t know yet, but I’ll see in the next few days. I suspect it does, since there are numerous positive reviews around the web. I will of course let you know. Especially if you remind me.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaMWqyg_xMo]
I don’t understand the benefits but it looks interesting. Keep us updated!
Some of the major benefits are:
– Faster loading of the site (CloudFlare does geographically-distributed caching, DNS optimization)
– Improved site security (CloudFlare protects from email harvesting, spam bots, and even DDOS attacks to some extent)
– Site is always online (CloudFlare keeps cached versions of the requested site pages, so even if your hosting server goes down, CloudFlare will be able to serve some content instead of “site unreachable”)
There are a few other benefits, such as statistics, easier integration with certain webapps, etc.
hmm…so all these means that I have to install in some way couldflare to my websites, right?
I don’t think I like that.
The three steps that you need to do are:
– Register an account with CloudFlare
– Change NS records in your DNS hosting to those that they will provide to you
– Install WordPress plugin (optional)
Apart from redirecting the DNS, you don’t really have to do anything. It will work without WordPress plugin, but it will work better with one. :)
Sound really really interesting. Should give it a try, thanks ;)