CloudFlare – The Free CDN

CloudFlare offers a free, robust CDN complete with industry leading security features and an extremely intuitive interface. This post aims to go over some of the features that make it so great.

I’m not sure where I first heard about CloudFlare, but it was definitely love at first sight. CloudFlare offers many great features to their customers, and most of them don’t cost a dime. CloudFlare is all about ease of use. There’s nothing complicated about their site at all. Everything is straight forward and very intuitive.

DNS Management

DNS management is one of my favorite features of CloudFlare.  Sometimes it’s the little things that sell me the most. In this case CloudFlare is my authoritative DNS server. What this means is, I can change my web host whenever I want and those changes will propagate almost instantly (This process would normally take over 24 hours). If security is your thing then this feature also masks where your true web host actually is, thus making your site all the more secure.

Below is what you would see if you used one of the numerous DNS lookup tools available on the internet. As you can see, it looks like my website is hosted at CloudFlare.  This actually proved useful for the infamous LulzSec group in 2011 when someone launched a DDoS attack against their website. Since it was behind CloudFlare’s CDN, their site remained active through the whole attack.

Performance Optimization

CloudFlare does a great job of optimizing page load times.  Since CloudFlare is a free CDN it can also cut back on hosting costs, this is because CloudFlare caches most of your sites static content on their servers, thus offloading server load from your web host. CloudFlare will also optimize your page content for you, so you don’t have to take the time to optimize every little resource on your web site.

 Security Features

CloudFlare utilizes a vast network of Juniper routers and firewalls. Their network has proven very secure against many DDoS attacks. They’ve mitigated some of the largest attacks the internet has seen. Even when things don’t go quite right, CloudFlare is very quick to let everyone know exactly what went wrong and why. When choosing a vendor, I would always want to side with the one that is very transparent about what they are doing, even if the news isn’t good news.

Nothing about their security settings are complicated, they put everything into plain English. You can easily choose the settings that go best with your site’s needs.  For example, if your website is under attack, you can select the ‘I’m under attack!’ level.

Normally CloudFlare doesn’t add cutting edge security features to their free plan, it just offers protection against moderately common attacks. If an attack is serious enough CloudFlare will make the decision to roll it out to their free users in a more timely manner. As was the case when the shellshock vulnerability was released.  If you run a website that needs cutting edge security, it’s probably best to pay for the pro or business tier.

CloudFlare also makes it exceedingly easy to block entire countries at a time. If you notice a certain country is giving your website more trouble than others, and you don’t need business from that country, all you have to do is type the name and click block. It’s literally that easy.

 Apps

I would say the CloudFlare apps are the icing on the cake. With a few clicks you can enable third party apps and integrate them into your website, all from the CloudFlare dashboard. There’s no need to try to mess with any code on your website, CloudFlare takes care of all the leg work.

Final Thoughts

CloudFlare offers the perfect solution for anyone who doesn’t need a full CDN, but wouldn’t mind having all those features at the very low price of free. If you have a website and haven’t heard of CloudFlare, or didn’t know what a CDN was before this post, then CloudFlare’s free tier is perfect for you and your site.