Maybe you’ve heard about this service called Cloudflare and wondered what the heck it is. Or maybe you started to read about Cloudflare and thought, “this doesn’t sound like something my little website needs”. I am here to tell you that no matter how small your website is, it can greatly benefit from Cloudflare’s services. And best of all, Cloudflare is free!
Here is how CloudFlare describes itself on its website:
Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. Our Anycast technology enables our benefits to scale with every server we add to our growing footprint of data centers.
What does all this mean? Let me translate for you. When you connect with Cloudflare, it speeds up your website by routing your traffic through its global network and delivering your web pages and content as fast as possible. It also stands in front of your site like a shield to protect it from malicious activity.
Free SSL (https) is another benefit that comes with Cloudflare. As long as your host supports self-signed SSL certificates, you can use Cloudflare to encrypt the traffic between your website and your visitors. This means not having to worry about renewing your SSL certificate every year or two. With Cloudflare, your SSL remains active indefinitely.
Configuring Cloudflare is not difficult – it just requires rerouting your website through their service by changing your nameservers. In the past few months, I have helped a number of clients switch over and they all have been very pleased with the results.
If you would like to switch over to Cloudflare and need assistance, please contact me here.