With a tagline of “Give us five minutes and we’ll supercharge your website,” CloudFlare (CloudFlare.com) boosts performance and security, quickly and easily, without the need for technical know-how and without incurring excessive expenditures.
According to the company, the average CloudFlare-powered website loads twice as fast while consuming 60 percent less bandwidth and incurring 65 percent fewer requests than before integration — and is more secure as well, with a significant decrease in spam and other attacks.
The average CloudFlare-powered website loads twice as fast while consuming 60 percent less bandwidth and incurring 65 percent fewer requests than before integration.
CloudFlare features several modules, including a content delivery network (CDN) that distributes content around the world from points closer to your visitors, speeding up your site’s performance to a global audience.
An optimizer provides better performance for web pages using ad servers and third party widgets, on mobile devices and computers; while security tools protect your website from threats, such as spam, SQL injection and DDOS attacks. Integrated analytics provides insight into all of a site’s traffic, including threats and search crawlers, while an app installer makes adding apps “one-click simple.”
CloudFlare routes your website’s traffic through its intelligent global network, automatically optimizing delivery so visitors get the fastest page loading times and best performance, while preventing abusive bots and crawlers from wasting bandwidth and server resources.
Compatible with any website, CloudFlare says its system becomes faster and smarter as its user base expands, and that it was designed to scale with one goal in mind: to help power and protect the entire Internet. It is usable by anyone with their own domain, with setup reportedly taking most website owners less than five minutes and requiring only a change to the domain’s DNS settings.
No additional hardware or software is required, nor are any changes to your website’s current code.
CloudFlare comes in several flavors: Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise, ranging in price from free to $3,000+ per month. With Pro accounts running $20 per month for the first site (with $5 for each additional site), CloudFlare may be a worthwhile investment — and since you can cancel the service anytime, it could be a no-risk way to maximize your site’s user experience, traffic levels and profitability.