What is Cloudflare

What is Cloudflare

Cloudflare act as a protection for the main server. It is an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers just like a proxy. So it can hide the existence and characteristics of an origin server or servers. When you go to a website, you’ll be directed to one of Cloudflare’s servers instead of the actual site’s servers. Cloudflare offers security and performance features to a wide network of websites.

Working of Cloudflare

Cloudflare is actually a Content Delivery Network (CDN). As the name suggests, they deliver the content to clients. It is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers. CDN stores a copy of the website with the caching technology at a specified number of locations around the globe. It stores duplicates of static content (such as CSS, JavaScript and image files) on its servers. So that the website can be retrieved from the closest server of the client. This will help to improve page load speeds, reduce bandwidth usage, and reduce CPU usage on the server. They also have an image optimization technique. This technique can reduce file sizes by an average of 35% and even optimize image display for mobile devices. This will also improve the performance.

With Cloudflare network of servers worldwide, if a server experiences an issue, the CDN simply “fails over” to use another server. Cloudflare also improves the server security by blocking threats before they reach on the site. It blocks and limits abusive bots. It provides protection from DDoS attack. There is an option in Cloudflare to enable attack mode when our domain is under attack.

They block threats based on a variety of factors, such as HTTP headers, blacklists, reputation, protect key ports—like FTP and SSH—from hackers, Browser integrity and more.

Conclusion

Cloudflare is the best CDN available among others in the market. It is the most popular one and has an excellent variety of services to both optimize and protect any website.

Note : It is always good to make such changes after consulting an experienced Linux administrator.

If you need assistance in setting up these kind of setups. you can check our cPanel Server management plans or Hourly Server management plan for one-time support.

 

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