• CloudFlare Overview
  • CloudFlare CDN
  • CloudFlare optimizer
  • CloudFlare security
  • CloudFlare analytics
  • CloudFlare apps
  • Sign Up / Compare

An Overview of CloudFlare

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

CloudFlare Illustration

CloudFlare's system gets faster and smarter as our community of users grows larger. We have designed the system to scale with our goal in mind: helping power and protect the entire Internet.

CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain, regardless of your choice in platform. From start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. Adding your website requires only a simple change to your domain's DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site's existing code. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. Our core service is free and we offer enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting or SSL.

Join CloudFlare today and be part of the community that is creating a better web.

CloudFlare features

  • CloudFlare CDN

    Distribute your content around the world so it's closer to your visitors (speeding up your site).

  • CloudFlare optimizer

    Web pages with ad servers and third party widgets load snappy on both mobile and computers.

  • CloudFlare security

    Protect your website from a range of online threats from spammers to SQL injection to DDOS.

  • CloudFlare analytics

    Get insight into all of your website's traffic including threats and search engine crawlers.

  • CloudFlare apps

    CloudFlare apps makes installing web apps on your site fast, safe and one-click simple.

CloudFlare is the next-generation CDN

CloudFlare designed its CDN (Content Delivery Network) without the legacy of the last 15 years. Our proprietary technology takes advantage of recent changes to hardware, web server technology and network routing. In other words, we've built the next-generation CDN. The result is a CDN that is easier to setup, more affordable, and performs better than any legacy CDN you've tried before.

We build our hardware from the ground up, which means that we choose the hardware components down to the chip level. Our proprietary software allows us to process millions of requests per second efficiently. We run our own network, so we choose the exact location of our edge nodes the most strategic points on the Internet. This is essential to ensure your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance.

CloudFlare's CDN reduces hops and lowers latency. On average, a request is fewer than 10 hops and takes less than 30ms. The result? Your website gains a global presence on an affordable budget.

CloudFlare makes your site faster

CloudFlare operates out of 23 data centers around the world. Our CDN automatically caches your static files at our edge nodes so these files are stored closer to your visitors while delivering your dynamic content directly from your web server. CloudFlare then uses a technology called Anycast to route your visitors to the nearest data center. The result is that your website, on average, loads twice as fast for your visitors regardless of where they are located.

On average, a website on CloudFlare loads twice as fast for its visitors, sees 65% fewer requests and saves 60% of bandwidth. You'll be able to see the exact speed benefits and savings with your personalized CloudFlare analyticsreport for your site.

We never charge for bandwidth

CloudFlare will never bill you for bandwidth usage. We believe if your site suddenly gets popular or suffers an attack, you shouldn't have to dread your bandwidth bill. CloudFlare allows Host 99 to charge a flat rate per plan, which is based on functionality.

No configuration necessary

You do not have to spend time designating which files to cache. CloudFlare's technology builds the cache for you based on your traffic and what objects on your site are safe to serve from the edge.

Works with static and dynamic content

CloudFlare caches static resources including JavaScript, CSS and images. Your dynamic content continues to be served direct from your web server automatically. You can choose which subdomains that you want to be a part of CloudFlare's CDN and which ones that you do not.

Page Rules

Page Rules provide you with fine-grained control of CloudFlare on each page of your site. You can enable full HTML caching, individually customize CloudFlare's features on a page by page basis or enable edge network forwarding to improve page delivery even further.

Always Online

If your server ever goes offline, CloudFlare will serve a limited copy of your cached website to keep it online for your visitors. CloudFlare builds the Always Onlineâ„¢ version of your website, so your most popular pages are represented.

Protect against traffic surges

If you get a surge in traffic, CloudFlare's CDN will absorb the effect so your server stays online. On average, you'll see 65% fewer requests to your servers and save 60% of your bandwidth, even with CloudFlare's free plan.

Automatic IPv6

Make your site available to visitors on IPv6 networks with the click of a button. No need to rush to upgrade your infrastructure. Keep your IPv4 infrastructure until you're ready, we'll make it seem to the world you're running a modern dual-stack.

Rock solid reliability

With CloudFlare's distributed network, if there is an issue in one of the data centers, visitors to the other data centers are unaffected. If the issue persists, our system can easily reroute visitors to the next closest data center. The end result is a seamless experience for your visitors. For more information about CloudFlare's reliability and uptime guarantees.

Works with other CDNs

If you're already using a CDN, CloudFlare works as a complement. You have the choice of routing CDN traffic through CloudFlare first (saving you bandwidth & money) or bypassing CloudFlare altogether for your CDN traffic.

Signing up is easy

To get access to CloudFlare's CDN, you do not need to change your hosting provider or registrar. CloudFlare works in conjunction with any underlying technology platform including Apache, NGINX, WordPress, Joomla!, and Windows. To sign up for CloudFlare's CDN, you make a simple change to your authoritative DNS. On average, it takes less than five minutes to sign up.

Web content optimization

Web performance is not just about moving static files closer to visitors, it is also about ensuring that every page renders as fast and efficiently as possible from whatever device a visitor is surfing from. CloudFlare users can choose any combination of these web content optimization features that take performance to the next level.

Rocket Loader

Automatically optimizes your pages to minimize the number of network connections and ensure even third party resources won't slow down page rendering.

Reduced connections

Combines multiple JavaScript files into a single request to avoid the overhead of multiple network requests.

Easy on and off

Each of the many CloudFlare Optimizer services is easy to turn on or off. Want to try one of the services? It is one click to turn on. Want to turn one of them off? It is one click simple.

AutoMinify

On-the-fly removal of unnecessary characters from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Saves 20% of a file's size and works without caching so it can support even fully dynamic pages.

Nothing to install

CloudFlare Optimizer is available without any hardware, software or code changes. With a simple change to DNS, you can be up and running in five minutes.

Local storage caching

Uses local storage on modern browsers and mobile devices to intelligently cache the objects needed to best render your site.

Cache header optimization

Automatically adjusts the cache header instructions so browsers will correctly cache the resources of a site to minimize the need for new requests.

Asynchronous resource loading

Optimizes your HTML so it renders as quickly as possible and without needing to wait for slow scripts like widgets or advertising. Your web pages will feel much snappier.

JavaScript bundling

Combines multiple JavaScript files into a single request to avoid the overhead of multiple network requests.

Browser optimization

Every browser works a bit differently, whether it is Internet Explorer on a PC or Safari on an iPhone. Browser optimization automatically adjusts the way content is delivered based on the particular device accessing the site to maximize speed without affecting the site's look or features.

Aggressive GZIP

Making a website half as big is as good as making the network twice as fast. Hardware optimized lossless compression reduces the size of all your resources and delivers them compressed even through lazy firewalls that incorrectly claim browsers don't support GZIP.

See the difference.




CloudFlare Rocket Loader makes the Financial Times website (FT.com) faster, in spite of them already using a top-tier CDN to deliver their content.

Ready for mobile

Today, websites are accessed on many devices from computers to smartphones to tablets. CloudFlare Optimizer automatically detects the type of browser a visitor is coming from and delivers content in a way that optimizes the performance for a particular platform. Your pages will look exactly the same as they did before, including any mobile version you may have created, but they will be structured in an optimized way for the platform. What this means is that your website will be fast on both computers and mobile devices.

CDN vs. WCO

A content delivery network (CDN) takes your static content and stores a copy closer to your visitors. By moving the content closer to your actual visitor, it takes less time to access the resources, which means the page loads faster. Content delivery networks have been around for the last 15 years. Nearly every large website on the Internet uses a CDN.

Web content optimization (WCO) improves the way the resources on your web page load. Websites are collections of multiple apps, widgets, and tags that include everything from the ad network code inserted on a page to a Twitter Retweet or Facebook Like button. WCO ensures that these resources that make up your web page load optimally. While CDNs have been around a long time, WCO is a newer development and takes performance to another level.

At CloudFlare, we built our own CDN from the ground up. We used the latest technologies like solid state drives for screaming I/O and Anycast routing and geo load balancing to make it as fast and efficient as possible. But we didn't want our efforts to make the web faster to stop with the traditional CDN. CloudFlare's Rocket Loader and other WCO services ensures your page renders as fast and efficiently as possible. By using both CDN and WCO, your site is optimized both at the network and browser level.

CloudFlare security

CloudFlare leverages the knowledge of a diverse community of websites to power a new type of security service. Online threats range from nuisances like comment spam and excessive bot crawling to malicious attacks like SQL injection and denial of service (DOS) attacks. CloudFlare provides security protection against all of these types of threats and more to keep your website safe.

Automatic learning of new attacks

CloudFlare's technology automatically detects new attacks that arise against any website on its network. Once CloudFlare identifies that there is a new attack, CloudFlare starts to block the attack for both the particular website and the entire community. This also means the longer you are on CloudFlare, the better the protection becomes.

Ridiculously easy security

Forget the confusing control panels of most security products. With CloudFlare, simply choose the security setting for your website. You can choose between I'm under attack!, High, Medium, Low and Essentially off. Provide the full armor defense, or stop only the worst threats. Behind the scenes, our systems learn about your site and automatically tune protection to your particular needs.

Threat reports and details

CloudFlare shows you the list of threats that have been stopped from reaching your website. You can sort and see threats by type, country origin, and severity. CloudFlare protects against a range of threats: cross site scripting, SQL injection, comment spam, excessive bot crawling, email harvesters, and more.

Browser integrity

Automatically performs a browser integrity check for all requests to your website by evaluating the HTTP headers for threat signatures. If a threat signature is found, the request will be denied.

Visitor reputation

CloudFlare uses threat data from a variety of sources to build a reputation for every visitor online. You set the desired security setting for your site and then CloudFlare's network stops the threats before it reaches your website. Reputation-based security provides a first line of defense for your website.

Block list / trust list

In addition to CloudFlare's automatic detection, you can easily add an IP address, IP ranges or entire countries to your Trust and Block list.

Saved bandwidth and server resources

By stopping threats before they get to your website you save bandwidth and resources. Your server is also freed up to serve your legitimate traffic optimally.

Protect SSH / Telnet / FTP ports

Add a layer of protection to ports like SSH, FTP and Telnet by disabling them for your root domain. Continue to access them from a subdomain of your choosing.

Collaborative security

CloudFlare uses the collective intelligence of its community to get smarter. CloudFlare's network learns from every new attack and then shares that information with the rest of the CloudFlare community. What this means is that since CloudFlare continually learns, every site, regardless of size, makes the system smarter.

Breaking the cycle of malware

Websites are empowered to inform visitors with compromised computers so these visitors can take action to clean the malware infection.

One-click SSL (Pro, Business and Enterprise)

SSL adds an additional layer of security for your visitors coming to your website. Add SSL with a single click without requiring you to change your existing configuration. CloudFlare makes it extremely easy to extinguish
the FireSheep!

CloudFlare analytics

CloudFlare provides insight to your website traffic that you can't get from other analytics programs.
In addition to visitor analytics, you can monitor threats and search engine crawlers. For most websites, these threats and crawlers make up 20% to 50% of traffic. It's traffic every website should understand, but most analytics services ignore.

Monitor threats

Unwanted visitors don't get picked up by popular analytics programs, so you don't even know they're visiting your website. With CloudFlare, you get insight into all visitors coming to your site, even the threats.

Powerful threat control

The threat control panel shows you the threat visitors by country origin, type, IP address and severity. The threat control panel is easy to manage. You can add or remove IPs, IP ranges and countries to your Trust or Block list.

Traffic control

Rather than plowing through hard-to-read log files, you get an easy-to-read version of all your website requests. You can stream all the traffic coming to your site or sort by time, visitor type, and traffic types.

Search engine crawlers

CloudFlare makes it easy for you to track which search engine crawlers are coming to your website. It's simple to see what bandwidth search engine crawlers consume and how that changes over time.

Real time traffic

For real-time insights into visitors on your website now, CloudFlare analytics update daily or in real-time, depending on the plan you choose.

Augment with third party analytics

CloudFlare has partnered with the most popular analytics programs. You can get other analytics services through our apps marketplace with one click. There is no hardware or software to install, so you can be up and running instantly.

GeoIP

CloudFlare includes the geographic location of your visitor so you can see which countries your visitors are coming from.

Compatible with all analytics programs

CloudFlare works with popular analytics programs, including Google Analytics. CloudFlare augments all the information that you already love from your current analytics solution with new information that you can't get anywhere else.

Outbound links

Don't just see which visitors are coming to your website, but learn more about how and where visitors are leaving your website. CloudFlare's outbound links shows you where your visitors are leaving on your website and where you are sending your traffic to.

CloudFlare apps

Apps make installing web apps fast, safe and one-click simple. Integrating additional services into your website can improve your visitors' experience, enhance your business, and solve real problems. With apps, integration is a breeze, regardless of your software platform.

See apps marketplace

Click once, deploy everywhere.

Apps can be installed across all content management systems (CMS) and products that you use to run your site with one click.

Why use apps?


Great partners

CloudFlare works with leading web application providers and independent developers to create a marketplace
where apps can be installed with ease
and confidence.

See apps marketplace

No code changes

At your request, apps can insert JavaScript in the right place, create DNS records to "brand" outside services via domain aliasing, and other technical changes that make integration challenging. If you're ever unhappy, you can turn apps off as quickly as you turned them on without worrying you forgot to undo some code.

Any platform or application

Apps work with any content management system (CMS) or software application that speaks HTML. In fact, apps are especially useful for those sites which have multiple applications running for different website functionality. With CloudFlare, you make changes in one place to cover your main site, your blog, support forums, microsite, wiki, or any other service. This is good for ensuring an app like Google Analytics is installed on all the pages of your site.

Limit security risks

CloudFlare provides protection for your website. We don't lower that security bar with apps. We review each service for security implications, and make sure our partners are top notch. If a vulnerability in an app is discovered we can patch it automatically or disable it until it is resolved.

Top notch performance

CloudFlare checks the performance of any integrated pieces from outside services installed via apps. We position the application code where it won't affect performance. Also, we offer graceful degradation, so if the app's servers are unavailable, your site is not affected. In many cases, CloudFlare hosts app resources on its global content delivery network (CDN), supercharging their delivery.

Automatic updates

To add functionality, services sometimes need to update their code. When you're
using apps, these updates are handled for you automatically, so you're always benefiting from the most current version of the service you've subscribed to, with full features.

No conflicts

Too many outside services at once can cause problems for one or more of the services. For the apps distributed by CloudFlare, we remove potential conflicts between these services, or keep you from installing two apps that can't work together.

Consolidated billing

For services that charge the site owner, all billing is consolidated in your CloudFlare account. Enter your payment information once, and future purchases are simply added to your CloudFlare bill, with an invoice breakdown by service.

Earn money from your website

Apps includes free services, for-fee services, and services that earn money for website owners. Simple integration of affiliate links, advertising services and more are available as apps. Try different revenue-generating apps, see which ones make you money, and easily turn off any that don't.

Features & pricing

CloudFlare Free

  • Fast site performance
  • Broad security protection
  • Powerful stats about your visitors
  • Peace of mind about running your website so you can get back to what you love

It's free!

CloudFlare Pro

  • Faster site performance
  • Optimized for mobile
  • Advanced security protection
  • Virtually real-time stats
  • Insight into what's happening on your site

$20 per month for your first website.

$5 per month for each subsequent website.

CloudFlare Business

$200 per month for each website.

CloudFlare Enterprise

  • Customized solution and setup consultation
  • Dedicated account manager
  • 24/7 phone support
  • 2500% service level agreement (SLA)

Pricing starts at
$3,000 per month.

Free, Pro & Business customers enjoy:
We never charge for bandwidth

CloudFlare will never bill you for bandwidth usage. We believe if your site suddenly gets popular or suffers an attack, you shouldn't have to dread your bandwidth bill.

Mix plan types

Within one account, you can have Free, Pro and Business websites. We make it easy to upgrade or downgrade on a per site basis.

Upgrade / downgrade anytime

You can decide to upgrade to Pro or Business anytime throughout the month and get access to the features instantaneously. Or if you want to downgrade, we make it simple.

Consolidated billing

With CloudFlare, you only get charged once per month. We group all of your sites and services on one, easy-to-understand invoice.

CloudFlare supercharges websites. To get a sense of what that means, compare our plans below.

Free Pro Business Enterprise
Performance
Globally load balanced content delivery network (CDN) Yes Yes Yes Yes
Automatic static content caching Yes Yes Yes Yes
IPv6 compatibility and gateway Yes Yes Yes Yes
Always Onlineâ„¢ Yes Yes Yes Yes
Rocket Loader Yes Yes Yes Yes
Global Anycast DNS Yes Yes Yes Yes
Polish & Mirage image optimization No Yes Yes Yes
Resource pre-loading No Yes Yes Yes
Mobile optimization No Yes Yes Yes
SPDY Support No Yes Yes Yes
Railgun origin network optimizer No No Yes Yes
Standard security
Reputation-based threat protection Yes Yes Yes Yes
Comment spam protection Yes Yes Yes Yes
Content scraping protection Yes Yes Yes Yes
Block visitors by IP range or country Yes Yes Yes Yes
Deploy collective intelligence to identify new threats Yes Yes Yes Yes
Notify visitors on how to clean their infected machine Yes Yes Yes Yes
Advanced security
SSL encryption No Yes Yes Yes
SSL encryption type Not Compatiable Host 99-issued Host 99-issued
or custom
Host 99-issued
or custom
SSL optimization No Yes Yes Yes
Web application firewall (WAF) No Yes Yes Yes
Mod_security rule support No No Yes Yes
Advanced DDoS protection - layer 3 and 4 No No Yes Yes
Advanced DDoS protection - layer 7 No No Yes Yes
Analytics and control
Analytics for traffic to your site Updated every
24 hours
Updated every
15 minutes
Updated every
15 minutes
Updated every
15 minutes
Easy DNS management Yes Yes Yes Yes
Cache purge Instant Instant Instant Instant
Wildcard support DNS only DNS only DNS only DNS and full proxy
Page rules 3 20 50 Custom
Minimum edge cache expire TTL 2 hours 1 hour 30 minutes 30 seconds
Client interface API Yes Yes Yes Yes
Interface customization No Yes Yes Yes
Custom DNS name servers No No Yes Yes
Raw log file access No No No Yes
App marketplace
Easy activation of web services Yes Yes Yes Yes
Exclusive CloudFlare apps Yes Yes Yes Yes
Support
Email support Yes Yes Prioritized 24/7 response
Phone support No No No Yes
Dedicated account manager No No No Yes
Service level agreement 100% uptime guarantee 2500% uptime guarantee