All About CloudFlare
What is CloudFlare? Who can use CloudFlare?
CloudFlare is a FREE system that improves the website’s performance and security where it acts as a proxy between your visitors and servers.
Furthermore, cloudFlare is not appropriate for websites that stream video directly. However, if you use YouTube or Vimeo to embed videos, then CloudFlare is appropriate.
How much does it cost?
CloudFlare basic service is free. For advanced caching, security and customization options, please refer to CloudFlare’s.
What are the advantages and limitations of using CloudFlare?
CloudFlare is a broad security solution that provides protection from many forms of malicious activity online including:
– comment spam,
– email harvesting,
– SQL injection,
– cross-site scripting,
– credential hacking,
– web software vulnerability.
Advantages
- Site Performance Improvement
CloudFlare has proxy servers located throughout the world. Proxy servers are located closer to your visitors which mean they will likely see page load speed improvements as the cached content is delivered from the closest caching box instead of directly off our server. There is a lot of research that shows that a faster a site, the longer a visitor stays. - Bot and Threat Protection
CloudFlare uses data from Project Honey Pot and other third party sources, as well as the data from its community, to identify malicious threats online and stop the attacks before they even get to your site. You can see which threats are being stopped through your CloudFlare dashboard here https://www.cloudflare.com/your-websites.html - Spam Comments Protection
CloudFlare leverages data from third party resources to reduce the number of spam comments on your site. - Alerting Visitors of Infected Computers
CloudFlare alerts human visitors that have an infected computer that they need to take action to clean up the malware or virus on their machine. The visitor can enter a CAPTCHA to gain access to your site. - Lower CPU Usage
As fewer requests hit our server, this lowers the overall CPU usage of your account. - New Site Stats
You have good tools to evaluate human traffic coming to your site, but no insight into search engine crawlers and threats. With CloudFlare, now you do.
Limitations
- Currently, requests must be directed to www.$domain instead of $domain (which means you may need to make some configuration changes).
- However, CloudFlare may affect internal statistic programs that read directly from Apache logs. (CloudFlare will not affect web-based analytic programs that use JavaScript like Google Analytics). While your logs will reflect fewer requests to your server and therefore lower load, the experience to your visitors should be unaffected.
- In other words, CloudFlare caches static content from your site. While this reduces the load on your server, it means that if you make a change to an existing static file, like an image, there may be a delay before the change appears. While you are updating your site, you can put CloudFlare in Development Mode so changes appear immediately.
Do I need to change nameserver to use CloudFlare?
No, you are not required to change nameservers as CloudFlare has been setup in your cPanel.