What is CloudFlare and How Can I Enable It in My Account?

All Tech Logic Solutions customers, whether on a shared or cloud hosting plan, can activate the CloudFlare CDN service enhancement via their accounts’ cPanel. It’s as easy as double-clicking the CloudFlare icon. You will then be prompted to set up an account. Simply agree to the Terms of Service, enter your email address and away you go!

Why enable CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is an easy to use and powerful website acceleration and protection solution. Make your website twice as fast and enjoy protection from a range of online threats, all at no extra charge.

How does it work? Well, in a nutshell, CloudFlare works as a proxy between our server and the visitors to your website, caching your site’s static content. This reduces the volume of requests that get sent to our servers, but still allows visitors to get full access to your site.

What CloudFlare Does for You…

- Improves Website Performance: CloudFlare’s network has proxy servers located all over the world. Instead of content being delivered directly off of the Tech Logic servers, it is grabbed from the closest ching box. By provisioning servers that are located closer to where your visitors are, CloudFlare improves your website’s speed. Never lose visitors again due to delays in your site’s page load times – the faster your site, the happier (and more likely to stay) are your visitors!

- Reduces Your CPU Usage: Because having CloudFlare enabled means fewer request to our servers, you’ll automatically lower your overall CPU usage.

- Offers an Additional Layer of Protection: CloudFlare is all about blocking bots and other malicious threats to your website. They collect data online (from Project Honey Pot, other 3rd party sources and from insights gathered from their active community) so that they are armed and ready to identify and block threats and attacks before they get anywhere near your website. Curious about which threats are being stopped? Your CloudFlare dashboard has all the details here: https://www.cloudflare.com/your-websites.html.

- Reduces the Amount of Comment Spam Filtering In: The 3rd party data CloudFlare collects also allows them to block spam comments from getting through on your site.

- Warns Your Visitors about Problems on Their Computers: If a visitor with an infected computer tries to access your site, CloudFlare is ready and waiting to alert them to their problem. Visitors can then take action to deal with the malware or virus lurking on their machine. In order to access your site, the visitor just needs to go through a CAPTCHA process.

- Pumps up Website Statistics: You already monitor your website traffic, but what about insights into non-human visitors? Shed a light on threats and search engine crawlers with CloudFlare.

- Provides Automatic Offline Browsing: In the unlikely event that the server is unavailable, CloudFlare will dip into its cache so that visitors can still access your website.

A few minor drawbacks

- Slight Delays for Changes: If you tweak an existing static file on your website, such as an image for example, there might be a small delay in the change showing up live online since CloudFlare is caching your static content. One way around this is to put CloudFlare in development mode while you’re performing updates – this way, the adjustments show up right away.

- Inability to Handle SSL Certificates: The part of your site that requires the use of an SSL certificate needs to be placed on an unprotected subdomain.

- Configuration Changes May Be Required: Requests must be sent to www.$domain as opposed to $domain. You may need to make a few tweaks to your configuration.

- Effects on Apache Log Statistics: If you use internal stats based on Apache logs, they will reflect fewer requests to your server and as a result lower load in general, but this should not affect the visitor experience in any way. If you’re using a web-based JavaScript program for your statistics (such as Google Analytics), there are no compatibility issues whatsoever with CloudFlare.

Additional resources

Want to dig a little deeper? Check out these useful links…
http://www.cloudflare.com/faqs.html
http://blog.cloudflare.com
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/

CloudFlare gives all Linux Cloud based Tech Logic customers FREE performance and security enhancement for their websites. Get it activated in your account today!