Cloudflare Review

Detailed Reviews

CloudFlare is a content delivery network provided by CloudFlare Inc., a company based in San Fransisco, California, USA. The service was initially launched in 2009, and in 2015, CloudFlare has grown into more than 1,500,000 customers worldwide according to official website.

Rather than a simple CDN provider, the company offer various website performance related solutions including DDoS attack protection, protection from bad traffic, firewall and much more. While traditional CDN providers require you to configure website code to serve content, Cloudflare can be setup simply by changing DNS.

Content Delivery Network

CloudFlare CDN is a solid platform that can allows to deliver your content in the closest proximity to your website visitors. It means that they are able to download your content from the nearest server in their area in order to obtain the fastest speed of the download or rendering of webpage. CloudFlare data centers are distributed around the world, with the total of 33 data centers available to serve your visitors. The platform works best for dynamic site content, with no complicated setup necessary. You can also make the CloudFlare CDN platform to work with your existing CDN platform.

Website Optimizer

This feature helps you to optimize your web content to work with third party web elements, such as advertisements, plug-ins, and other widgets. It prevents the third-party web elements from slowing down your website loading speed. All third-party requests and queries go through the CloudFlare CDN platform, and then delivered along with your website content for faster speed. You can activate this feature simply by changing your DNS, without the need to install or configure anything for it to work. CloudFlare also optimizes your website for optimal mobile-viewing experience for your visitors.

Security and Firewall

CloudFlare provides various security features that ensure the safety of your website, as well as maximum protection against malicious software, hacker, or spammer attacks. It automatically learns of new attacks and build proper protection for similar attacks in the future. CloudFlare also provides the details of threats that you have undergone during specific period of time, and whether the platform has stopped the threat or not. The Visitor Reputation feature allows you to analyze the reputation of each visitor that visits your website, based on threat data from various sources.

Reports and Analytics

CloudFlare provides a detailed report on your site performance, as well as various metrics related to your website. Threat monitor allows you to analyze all visitors of your website, as well as those who pose as threats to your website. From this information, you can take action in blocking the threats by blocking their IP addresses. Traffic control allows you to view the detailed reports about the traffic that comes to your website, and sort them based on time, traffic types, and visitor types. You can also monitor your website traffic in real time from within your dashboard.

Apps

The CloudFlare platform provides many useful apps that you can install on your website easily, without the need to copy and embed the code manually. The process is done in a drag-and-drop basis. This allows you to improve your website easily and give your visitors better user experience over time. The apps will work on any CMS platform that you use for your website, as well as give better protection for your website. With the automatic update feature, you can be sure that you get the latest functionality of your apps.

Conclusion

By charging users per website instead of providing a Pay As You Go service, CloudFlare can be the best solution for your business. If your website has a big monthly data transfer, it might be better to use this CDN platform to minimize the cost of your bandwidth. However, if your website has low data transfer, this CDN platform might not be the best solution for your business. The host of features offered by CloudFlare should also be considered, as they provide high quality service for their customers. It might be good to try the free plan at first to determine the overall quality of the platform before committing your business fully into the service.