What is Cloudflare?
Have you ever experienced crawling page loading times which make the website take an eternity to open? Ever heard of a website being down due to a DDoS attack by hackers? Have you also been unfortunate enough to come across a website which simply does not open on your smart phone or tablet? If yes, then it may be possible that they might not be using Cloudflare’s services to enhance and optimize their websites to cater to the traffic they see on a regular basis.
So, if you are not familiar with Cloudflare Inc., let me enlighten you about what it does. Cloudflare is a company which serves to provide the ultimate online tool which speeds up and protects your website to maintain and enhance your online presence so that you cater to the needs of interested online parties. By using the latest technology, Cloudflare provides different IT-related services which include webhosting; to monitor and enhance your website performance and internet security; to protect your website from unwanted attacks.
Hence, by acting as a mediatory between your website and your user, Cloudflare enabled websites see a much better performance with shorter load times and significantly lesser downtimes as compared to websites which are not configured with Cloudflare.
How Does Cloudflare Work?
In layman terms, Cloudflare functions as a barrier between your website and those who try and access it through the internet. Think of it as a security guard who checks all the people who which to enter a premises by making them pass through a security scanner. In a similar way, Cloudflare is deployed much like how a firewall is to check and monitor IP addresses trying to establish a connection to the website. By doing this, it identifies users from crawlers, bots and potential hackers which may slow down or temporarily take down the website. Other functions of Cloudflare include;
- Content Distribution Network (CDN)
- Website Optimization
- Internet Security
- Protection from DDoS Attacks
- Efficient DNS Services
Advantages of Using Cloudflare Enabled Hosting
Opting to use Cloudflare’s array of different webhosting and internet security services provided to you by SwissNS can help you in a number of ways, especially if you happen to have a website. The numerous ways in which Cloudflare enabled hosting can help you include;
- Improved Website Performance
Through the efficient content delivery network (CDN) made possible by servers located in more than 80 cities worldwide, Cloudflare enabled website visitors can say goodbye to slow page load speeds and look forward to a smooth viewing experience.
- Device Optimization
Making sure each website is optimized according to the device being used to access it is another key consideration in this day and age. The ‘Rocket Loader’ and ‘AutoMinify’ features allow pages to be rendered in real-time by determining which type of device is trying to access the page.
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection
Cloudflare also provides protection to your website against structured attacks by hackers who aim to take down your website by presenting it with multiple access queries which ultimate overload website traffic and making it relatively slow or inaccessible.
- Plesk Panel
Through the Plesk control panel, you can easily manage different functions of your Cloudflare account to maintain efficiency in website and other operations.
- Cached Copies
Cloudflare creates cached copies of web pages to reduce page load times, bandwidth usage and CPU usage which may be used to entertain more requests at a given time. Using Cloudflare has found to result in page load speeds increasing two fold and bandwidth usage falling by almost 60%.
By using SwissNS’s Cloudflare enabled hosting services, you can enjoy all these benefits and more at the simple click of a button. Check out our webhosting and internet security offers by visiting our page.
