What is Cloudflare?

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Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) (CDN). Cloudflare is a firm that provides CDNs, web security, and other services. Cloudflare's main goal is to assist small and large enterprises in securing and speeding up their internet assets. It was founded in 2009 with the goal of locating and eradicating the source of email spam. It has evolved over time and today serves millions of consumers with DNS and security services. It is now one of the largest cloud network platforms, with over 12 million domains trusting it. Furthermore, it is responsible for roughly 10% of all internet traffic. We look at how Cloudflare works and the primary advantages of adopting it for your company.

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Cloudflare is on a mission to make the Internet a better place. Cloudflare is one of the largest networks in the world. Thanks to Cloudflare, businesses, non-profits, bloggers and anybody with an online presence now have quicker, more secure websites and apps. Millions of websites use Cloudflare, and our network is growing by tens of thousands every day. Cloudflare serves 32 million HTTP requests per second on average and powers Internet requests for millions of websites.

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Features of Cloudflare

Defend (DDoS) attack

Cloudflare protects websites, applications, and entire networks from DDoS attacks, blocking over 57 billion assaults per day.

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Load-balanced CDN on a Global Scale

Intelligent load balancing mechanisms deployed across 200 data centers worldwide ensure that there are no bottlenecks.

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Static Content Caching 

Content is cached on strategically situated edge servers for faster delivery and lower latency.

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Argo Smart Routing 

Using Argo's intelligent routing algorithm, Cloudflare intelligently routes traffic through the fastest network paths.

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Geo-based Routing

Thanks to global load balancing, visitors to your web application will be served content from the servers nearest to them.

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Streaming

Cloudflare's on-demand streaming offering is both cost-effective and simple to use.

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Optimizing for Mobile

Cloudflare Mirage recognizes the browser type on the user's workstation and adapts automatically, optimizing for performance, thanks to its virtualized and lazy-loaded images.

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Argo Tunnel

Cloudflare's Argo Tunnel service can assist you in establishing an encrypted tunnel between your nearest data center and your origin server, ensuring complete security.

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Intelligence should be used to detect new threats

Cloudflare has intelligent technologies that can learn from attacks on any site and instantaneously extend better protection to all other sites based on what they've learned.

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Network of China

Cloudflare is the only truly global network with strong connections in China that provides quick, secure, and reliable experiences for your customers both inside and outside of China. 

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Analytics

Deep insights and intelligence takes a detailed approach to your cached data, with comprehensive product-specific dashboards and the ability to create custom dashboards using GraphQL and the Analytics API.

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How Cloudflare works

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Cloudflare is a plug-and-play security layer that can be added to any website to help protect it from threats and optimize its resources to be delivered to users swiftly and efficiently.

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Thanks to its global anycast network, Cloudflare acts as a protective gateway between your website's webserver and the internet. So, once a request is received, Cloudflare inspects it for numerous criteria such as location, browser from which the request is coming, the number of requests coming from the same IP address, and the resources required.

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As a result, Cloudflare can quickly distinguish between good and bad traffic, eliminate threats and spamming requests from bots, and allow only legitimate user traffic to reach your origin servers in this manner. As a result, the burden on your server is reduced, and service disruption is avoided. In addition, Cloudflare will replace your original website server IP address with a Cloudflare IP address if you enable a Cloudflare proxy (orange cloud).

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This protects your webserver from threats and attacks that specifically target its IP address. This has the extra benefit of concealing your actual hosting provider.

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Why use Cloudflare?

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• Cloudflare provides a DNS service that is entirely free.
• With its enormous edge network availability worldwide, Cloudflare provides a free content delivery network (CDN).
• It provides a free SSL certificate, which allows you to convert an HTTP website to an HTTPS compatible webpage in seconds.
• Cloudflare provides DDoS protection for free.
• It provides free content caching, which speeds up page loading times.
• It includes a firewall service that is included in the Cloudflare free plan. You can use this to block bots, traffic from specified countries, and IP addresses, among other things.
• It makes it simple to export and import DNS settings.
• Cloudflare also provides DNS-based load balancing for as little as $5 per month, including two origin servers and 500K free DNS queries. All included active health monitoring for each origin server, automated failover, and geolocation-based routing.
• It also lets you modify DNS settings for several domains from a single account, even if you're on the free plan, and there are no limits on the number of DNS queries you can do.

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Advantages

Cloudflare is primarily a content delivery network (CDN), with over 200 data centers worldwide. It improves site speed while also providing rich security features.

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Enjoy advanced analytics with comprehensive dashboards and in-depth granular cache data analysis insights.

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It is a favorite in the business since it is simple to set up and has an easy user interface.

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Serve a cached version of your website to your clients even if the origin server is offline, ensuring that your site is always available to them.

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Cloudflare offers a free trial edition that allows you to try out some of the essential functions for your setup.

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Disadvantages

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DNS zones are managed, which may not be ideal for some users. In addition, only one level of SSL certificate is issued to sni.cloudflaressl.com. Most of the other drawbacks are connected to the feature's lack of availability in the free version.

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Conclusion

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Overall, CloudFlare is worth a go if you're looking for a content delivery network that won't jeopardize your website's security or cost you a fortune. CloudFlare is a good option. In less than 5 minutes, you can boost the performance of your website.