What is CloudFlare and Why You Should Use CloudFlare

A few month ago I became intrigued by the CloudFlare hype and gave it a try. Well, I have great news to report – it’s excellent! If you’re still not sure what CloudFlare is or how it can help your site, then keep reading…

What is CloudFlare?

Well, they say it better than I can on this page:

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

Got all that? If not, let’ say it differently. Here’s what CloudFlare does for your website:

Why You Should Use CloudFlare

Global CDN – CloudFlare is a CDN (Content Delivery Network). It delivers content from the location closest to the visitor. This speeds up your site’s loading time. They have plenty of data centers around the world. SPEED!!!

Cache – More speed? It caches your site without having to go through complicated configurations and technical jargon. CloudFlare will cache static content such as images, CSS, and other files on your site automatically. Best of all, it doesn’t cache the HTML so you’re site will always see the most updated content. You can even continue using your existing WordPress cache plugin in conjunction with CloudFlare without conflict.

Security – Am I the only one who’s seeing a spike in security threats and attacks lately? Well, CloudFlare keeps track of potential threats and blocks them before they get to your site. Whether it be spammers, denial of service (DOS) attacks, or suspicious bots, CloudFlare’s got your back. They use their large database of information to determine who’s a threat, and you can even choose IP addresses to block.

Optimize Files – If you’re using a plugin to optimize your CSS or JavaScript files, you can now let CloudFlare handle that task.

Server Down? – Don’t worry because CloudFlare actually continues to serve the cached pages. to visitors. That will save you some embarrassment while you go figure out what’s happening.

Cool Analytics – Google Analytics is great, but it won’t give you some of the neat insight that CloudFlare’s Analytics displays such as threats, search engine crawlers, or how much time your visitors have saved because your site loads faster. What I like about their analytics screen is that it’s quite digestible and not as intimidating for beginners.

If these awesome benefits are not enough to compel you to try CloudFlare, then how about the fact that it’s FREE! Yes, CloudFlare does all this for free. As expected, if you want more features, you can always go the Pro route, but this is plenty sufficient for most bloggers. So hop over to CloudFlare are test a site or two.

On a side note, if you’re keen on having your mail handled by Google, then check out this post on how to setup Google Apps email on CloudFlare.

Let me know your results in the comments. Did your site load much faster? Same? Impressed or not? Share your experience.

Posted by WPcharlie on February 18, 2012. Filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry