Cloudflare is a CDN (Content Delivery Network) offering more functionality than the Standard CDN can offer. It provides DDoS attacks with added security. It caches your website’s static resources making your website load faster & putting less web hosting load on. Sitting in the middle of your domain name & web host is the CDN.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare passes all the traffic that would hit your server to go through Cloudflare’s filtering process and only the validated traffic is routed to the host. You can have different levels of security based on the spammers & hackers you wish to filter out.

It is the commercial content delivery network with built-in distributed service denial (DDoS) defense. It can act upon your website as a reverse proxy & domain name server. If your hosting provider does not present native IPv6, it offers a useful IPv6 transition mechanism.

It’s the content delivery network that uses your domain name to act as a middle layer between your actual browsing host & user site. It is a complimentary service with premium High Traffic Site Packages. You can change your web-hosting without waiting for the name-servers to propagate; it has many data-centers around the world. So, the data-center that is nearest to them will serve your visitors.

Advantages of using Cloudflare

• Cloudflare hides your web-host’s original IP address so that any hacker cannot attack the server.
• As Cloudflare is like a CDN, it can continue to serve cached versions of most of your web-pages even if your website goes down.
• Cloudflare is free to get started whereas the other CDN services are paid.
• You can filter out the bad traffic and the website will be protected from the automated bots & the spammers.
• If your IP Address is known to the hacker, Cloudflare can protect your server from DDoS as the attacker targets IP directly bypassing the Cloudflare.
• Cloudflare is very easy to setup & use. If you use WordPress or Drupal & have access to your domain registrar.
• Cloudflare can protect your API by limiting the number of requests for a given time using a rule.

Disadvantages of Cloudflare

• Cloudflare can slow down the page load rather than speeding it up.
• If you are on shared hosting, you may need to check if your host supports Cloudflare or not though most shared hosts do not support Cloudflare.
• Cloudflare offers limited security rules.
• Cloudflare has limited stats & analytics.
• Cloudflare had the issues with owners being blocked out of site.