What is Cloudflare?
Over the last few years I have used Cloudflare services a number of times. Recently I attended a small informal gathering of young bloggers at the request of my niece.
We got chatting about SEO and CMS platforms like Wordpress, either via Wordpress.com or self hosted instances. And the inevitable came up regarding site security, domain hosting, caching plugins and the like. I mentioned Cloudflare, and was looked at blankly and asked What is Cloudflare? I guess not everyone knows.
Of course there are many options and features available on Cloudflare. The first question that came up was where to register your domain, some are cheap for the first year, then the second year is quite expensive. We have all seen that. So I suggested using Cloudflare’s DNS registrar. Not only are they reliably cheap, you can host your Domain name on their DNS servers. Arguably some of the fastest DNS servers on the planet. Low latency DNS resolution means your site starts to load a few milliseconds faster, it may seem un important, but it all adds up.
Of course I also mentioned, and went into some of the details related to JS, html and CSS minification, cacheing, and security. These are all great ways of speeding up your site, especially multi page media rich sites based on wordpress. It doesn’t matter how fast your web host is, small things can be done to speed up your site.
The problem with big CMS applications like Wordpress and Joomla, is that these relay on plugins, adding more weight to your site and more load on your web host.
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The solution to this is often to use a CDN (Content Distribution Network) and cache content on the edge. What that means for the uninitiated is that rather than your site visitor get every piece of code and image from your web host, the CDN network caches it on their network. Then a visitor essentially gets your site content, or a fair chunk of your site content from the CDN operators infrastructure and not from your webhost. This speeds up delivery time.
To elaborate a little more. If your web host is in Dallas, but your visitor is in Seattle, the network traffic has to cross half the country to access your site, adding latency and potential bottle necks slowing down access to your site. This is amplified greatly if your visitor is in Europe, or Asia.
A CDN will have nodes in multiple cites and countries around the world. Cloudflare has presence in 100+ countries and over 250 Cities. This means that your blog, or business web site can feel like its local regarding access speeds. Someone in Melbourne Australia will access the locally cached version of your site, rather than have a 200ms to 400ms latency added and who knows what network congestion.
Cloudflare offers many features and are always adding features, Many of which are available on the Free or Pro Tiers. Including Caching, SSL Certificates, Brotli Compression, Firewall security, Bot and DDos protection and more.
For a small fee on the $20 a month Pro Tier, can you get all the Free stuff, and Image optimisation, on the fly image resizing, Wordpress Acceleration, Web Application Firewall, TCP Optimization and more.
I recently wrote a much longer review of Cloudflare which can be read on Web Review Star, its called What is Cloudflare and is it any good?It covers some of the features in more depth. Including a Before and After Cloudflare test.
There are of course other CDN’s out there, many are really good at what they do. I personally prefer Cloudflare because it has so many features even if you have almost no money to spend on luxuries like CDN’s
