Why Use Cloudflare?

What is Cloudflare? What does it do? What are its benefits and downside? These are the questions we will answer in this blog. Starting with:

 

1. What is Cloudflare?

Is a web service provider that specializes in CDN (Content Delivery Network). From this service sprung out a chain of services that are correlated to each other such as web optimization, security, and reliability.

2. What does it do?

Cloudflare saves a copy of your website pages to their memory and serves that copy to any request of that page again. This saves valuable if not limited resources of your web server so that it will not always take the load for all the page requests.

3. What are the benefits?

• Faster page load - since the final appearance of the page is loaded from the memory. It does not need to perform any transformation of data that was being done from your web server which minimizes page load time.
• Optimized Page - Cloudflare has a functionality that can minify and asynchronously load your assets such as your JS, CSS, and HTML.
• Media Cache - All of your images and videos are also saved in the memory
• Security - DDOS attacks have minimum or zero effect on your website as a result of your pages being served from the memory which is distributed in different places in the world. Cloudflare also updates its threat audit in real time which directly benefits all of its customers.
• Reliability - since your web pages are in the memory Cloudflare will continuously serve you web pages even if your web server is down.
• It is FREE (Basic Services)

In addition to the benefits mentioned above, Cloudflare also offers a variety of advanced features for those who require more customization and control. These features include advanced security measures, content delivery network (CDN) optimization, and domain name system (DNS) management. However, configuring these features can be complex, which is why some businesses choose to hire a Cloudflare expert from Toptal to help them maximize the benefits of the service.

4. What are the downsides?

• There is no functionality where you can only cache a certain part of the page. (donut caching)
• All requests will go through Cloudflare.

We are a big fan of  https://cloudflare.com/ here in Block77 and we barely scratched the surface of their services in this post. 

If you would like to know more about Cloudflare services or how to improve your website. Feel free to send us a message.