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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.