As website owners, we all know more or less about the Content Delivery Network (CDN). But many may not know that Cloudflare.com is the highest quality CDN service, a security provider.
 |
| What is Cloudflare? |
As website owners, we need to be aware of the speed and security of our site. Unnecessary visitors can come to a website and there can be many harmful virus attacks.
We know that just as an AdSense account is suspended due to invalid clicks, the website loses rank from Google.
It is a little difficult to be manually safe from these problems and there is a possibility of wasting a lot of time.
To get rid of this we use CDN which is an additional security layer for the website. Although there are currently many CDN services, Cloudflare is the most popular.
In today’s article, we will discuss what Cloudflare is and how it works. So let’s get started.
Let’s start with a small example so that you can easily understand what Cloudflare is and why you should use it. Because the Cloudflare issue is very similar to this example.
When one becomes more popular, many enemies are created (jealous person). As a result, a guard or bodyguard is needed for his protection. Who are ready to repel any attack on that person.
Cloudflare is one such protector or guard. So let’s find out now what Cloudflare is, why, and how to use it.
What is Cloudflare.com?
Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDN services providers.
Cloudflare has a lot more features that a CDN needs to have. They currently have Cloudflare Cache Servers in 200 cities worldwide.
There are currently over 25 million Internet properties that use the Cloudflare service.
They handle 21 million HTTP requests every second. They can manage many large DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare uses a reverse proxy system to serve them. CloudFlare’s DNS speed is much higher than Google’s DNS.
Their default is DNS 1.1.1.1 and it’s completely free. To use this DNS you need to add CloudFlare’s Name Server to your Domain Control Panel.
They also provide security to protect against DDoS attacks, in addition to providing CDN services. At present they have four separate services in addition to the CDN service.
These are DDoS Protection, Teams, Workers, Pages, respectively.
- Here is the DDoS website with protection,
- Teams is a dedicated Cloudflare security authentication service,
- Workers is a serverless computing system and
- Pages is a frontend environment system that is managed from Cloudflare’s data center.
Cloudflare is not a hosting or domain provider. You may be wondering, why Cloudflare is needed?
While Cloudflare does not offer you hosting-domain benefits, the benefits it offers will be enough to get you interested in using Cloudflare.
To put it simply, Cloudflare is a third party, a layer, a medium.
However, there is no third party that is harmful to you, your visitors. On the contrary, it is a useful third party or medium.
Cloudflare gives you more benefits besides CDN, DDoS Protection, Web Optimization, etc.
Which will keep your site fast and secure. So, Cloudflare is a layer that acts as a bodyguard for your website.
How does Cloudflare work?
When we enter a website address in a web browser, it requests pages to the server via the Internet.
In a conventional way this request goes directly to the server and from there returns directly to the client-server.
But if you use Cloudflare, that request shows the results from the cached version of that page in the caching server of Cloudflare.
It does not send any request directly to the main server even if many requests are made on the same page.
This greatly reduces the chances of the server crashing and does not cost the server extra bandwidth.
Since the content is loaded from the cache server and shows from the local cache server to the client device, each page loads very fast.
Cloudflare works through Edge Server, not directly through Origin Server. This reduces the pressure on the original server and increases the speed of the website, making it possible to maintain security and bandwidth properly.
How was Cloudflare.com born?
Cloudflare began its journey in 2009. It is a website infrastructure and internet security company.
Cloudflare is a public company that provides CDN, Internet security services. Headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Its total revenue by 2020 is $431 million. At present, a total of 1069 employees are working in Cloudflare.
Cloudflare was founded by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Jatlin.
Their main purpose was to provide additional security to all websites so that the sites could remain active and secure at all times.
So far their service is much better and faster than other CDN services. By setting up servers in all the major cities of the world, they have made the website load faster.
What are the benefits of using CloudFlare.com?
You do not need any coding knowledge to use Cloudflare. In addition, you can use their free package to do almost all the work of a website.
The big advantage of CloudFlare is that you can use it on any platform. It can be used on any static website including Blogger, Magento, WordPress.
The Cloudflare Dashboard can be operated on many advanced and simple navigation systems. On the dashboard, you can see all kinds of analytics for your website.
For example, how many visitors are browsing the site, how many are hitting the request site, etc. data can be seen.
SSL can be added to the site which exchanges data by encrypting each request.
If you want, you can use a firewall to maintain the security of the site. Any specific IP or IP group can be blacklisted.
The speed of the website can be optimized which increases the speed of the overall site without speeding up each page.
Site images, CSS, JS, HTML can be minified to increase speed. This reduces the file size of the site and the site can be loaded much faster.
You can manage network rules from this dashboard. All these services you can use in the case of the app without the website.
Cloudflare has two special projects created for some special customers.
The two projects are called Project Galileo and Athenian Project. Let’s learn a little bit about Project Two.
Athenian Project: The main goal behind creating this project is to provide the highest quality Internet security to the local government.
In other words, this project works to keep all the information about the elections and the national identity related to the elections registered at the local level confidential and secure.
Project Galileo: This project protects organizations or websites related to journalism, human rights, democracy, etc.
They provide such services for free. Many websites and apps currently use these two projects.
Why use Cloudflare?
What is Cloudflare, we found out? Now that we know why use Cloudflare.com.
If there is any shortcoming in understanding what I have discussed above so far, it will become clearer now.
For your convenience, I want to explain in simple language in short. Suppose your site name is example.com.
Suppose your domain-hosting is taken from a provider like Bluehost, Hostgator, or GoDaddy.
Now think, when a visitor visits your site, that visitor will be able to visit your site directly. Visitors who come this way will visit your site directly. There is no problem.
But there is no guarantee that all visitors will be real visitors. Hackers, robots, crawlers can all come here with visitors.
And even then you will be able to access your site directly. This can damage your site.
Now here if you use Cloudflare the image will be different, but you will not lose your visitors.
If you use Cloudflare on your site, all visitors, attackers, robots, whatever. Not everyone will access your site directly.
When someone wants to visit your site by typing example.com in the address bar, take them first to Cloudflare, not directly to the data center of your hosting server, then they will be able to visit your site.
Now you may be wondering why so many twisted patches are needed? Yes, of course. When normal visitor comes, they will be able to visit your site very easily.
But when an attacker comes to your site, Cloudflare will prevent them from accessing your site. That way, it will also prevent robots and others who are not a benefit to your site.
Now you may be wondering, how will Cloudflare understand, who is a normal visitor and who is an attacker? Yes, there is a way to understand that too.
Cloudflare has a number of IP addresses that all the IPs used by the attackers are blocked by Cloudflare.
And when someone comes to visit your website from such an IP, their access to Cloudflare will be blocked.
If you look at the image below, you will easily get a clear picture of what Cloudflare is and why you should use it.
 |
| How does Cloudflare work? |
Cloudflare.com Criticism
Undoubtedly Cloudflare is one of the most trusted content delivery network services. But at different times there is a lot of criticism about them.
As many critics say they provide services outside of their policy.
For example, they provide services to a forum called 8chan, which is involved in gun attacks in Christchurch, Texas, and New Zealand.
Later, however, Cloudflare’s CEO stopped supporting 8chan.
In addition, in 2016-17, 6 million user data was leaked online due to the attack called “CloudBleed HTTPS traffic leak“.
Criticism of Cloudflare then became more intense. But they are advancing day by day by making their technology more advanced and powerful.
Many small and large websites have started using this service due to the benefits of CDN. CDN also protects the security of the site as it speeds up the site.
Conclusion
This article discusses the best CDN CloudFlare in detail. It also highlights how Cloudflare is better than all other CDN services.
Hopefully, after reading this article, all kinds of confusion with Cloudflare have been removed. If you have any questions about CDN or Cloudflare.com, please let us know in the comment box. Thank you.