CloudFlare and its used
Customers keeps complaining that the website/blogs are slow or the loading
time of the domain has increased. You are aware about the server that it has
high performance hardware and best software to run the server with 100%
uptime. Still the customers keeps complaining that his/her domain is loading
slow. Perhaps you may loose few customers for this reason.
It is weird that the customers are unaware of the reasons behind the domain
loading slow. But they keep contacting us(the technical team) to know the
reason if the issue is with the server. Even few customers has opened a ticket
saying that the loading time of his domain has increased from 4 seconds to 7
seconds. why? I was cornered for these kind of issues. Even if I inform the
customer that the domain static pages are causing the issue but still they are
not satisfied. I couldn’t find an issue in the server but still the issue
persist for the customers. Finally, I have found the solution called
“CloudFlare” which has fulfilled the customer satisfaction.
What is a CloudFlare?
CloudFlare is a CDN service that makes your website faster, safer, and
smarter. In other words, CloudFlare supercharges websites. It performs a
variety of tasks to ensure your visitor will never have to sit down and wait
for your site to load again. It caches resources, it has a new beta feature to
minimize your HTML, CSS and JS if you aren’t already, the Pro version can
preload other pages before you go to them so they appear instantly, it can
manage integrating Google Analytics and has hot-link protection for your
images.
Advantages of CloudFlare.
1. CloudFlare acts as a middle tier, acting as a community that collects
threat information (spammers, bots, etc) and protects your website/blog from
the same threats. CloudFlare keeps your website/blog safe from these attacks
by challenging them with a CAPTCHA system. Also, it blocks all 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. With
CloudFlare, you can block spammer’s or annoying IP addresses easily with the
control panel.
2. CloudFlare provides an extra caching system. When a visitor comes to your
website/blog, CloudFlare serves them the static contents from a server closest
to your visitor. This improves the load time for your website/blog
significantly because data travel is shorter. Â Once your website is a part of
the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through its intelligent
global network. CloudFlare support team automatically optimize the delivery of
your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best
performance.
3. If your server is down, CloudFlare will serve your visitors its whole cache
(including your pages, posts, etc) so in a way, your website/blog will never
go offline. CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. CloudFlare’s
system gets faster and smarter as the community of users grows larger. They
have designed the system to scale with the goal in their mind: helping power
and protect the entire Internet.
4. CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain,
regardless of your choice in platform. 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. CloudFlare help to speed up the website by redirecting the traffic
to the nearest node.
5. In general, CloudFlare makes your sites load about 45% faster, uses 60%
less bandwidth and is way more secure.
