In this article you will learn: what CloudFlare is and what benefits you will get using the CloudFlare content delivery network.

What is CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is a maintenance and security service that we provide to our clients. On average, a website with CloudFlare loads twice as fast, consumes 60% less traffic, receives 65% less server load, and is more secure.

What connection exists between the site and CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is a provider that is a third party in providing services to website clients through an affiliate program.

How does CloudFlare technology work?

CloudFlare works as a reverse proxy. This means that if a website is part of the CloudFlare community, then all of its traffic is routed through global network CloudFlare.

The CloudFlare network stores copies of static files in locations geographically close to web visitors, meaning they load quickly. CloudFlare caches resources such as CSS, JavaScript, and images. At the same time, no additional effort is required on your part - CloudFlare technology automatically determines which files are subject to caching based on their extensions. We do not cache dynamic content. The technology also applies compression to each request.

The CloudFlare network also blocks threats and a variety of malicious bots before they attack your server, preventing loss of traffic and server resources.

Where are CloudFlare's data centers located?

CloudFlare network on this moment located in 12 geographical locations. San Jose, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, New Jersey, Dallas (all USA), Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. In each of these nodes, CloudFlare performs caching and bot filtering. Will be put into operation in September 2011 additional centers data in London and Miami.

What types of sites can use CloudFlare?

Almost any website can work with CloudFlare. This technology supports both static and dynamic websites. CloudFlare is not suitable for sites that represent streaming video and audio directly from the original server. If you use YouTube or Vimeo for video attachments on your site, this option is compatible with CloudFlare.

My site uses SSL. What should I do?

If you have SSL, your site can work with CloudFlare, but it requires an extra step to connect. If your SSL is hosted on its own sub-domain (that is, SSL), then make sure that this sub-domain is grayed out (deactivated). If SSL is on the root domain or www, then you need to upgrade to the paid Pro service.

Will CloudFlare speed up and protect my root domain?

CloudFlare can only accelerate and protect CNAMEs. Since your root domain is an A record, we recommend that you direct your traffic to "www" via an .htaccess file. If you do not redirect traffic, then all traffic to www.mydomain.com will be accelerated and protected by CloudFlare (as indicated in the statistics), while traffic to mydomain.com will not be served by CloudFlare.

Are there any sub-domains that cannot be activated under CloudFlare?

Subdomains in CloudFlare are highlighted with an orange marker color. Subdomains that do not work in CloudFlare are highlighted in gray. The CloudFlare network can only carry traffic as a proxy (“by proxy”) through ports 80 and 443. To avoid problems, the following sub-domains will be marked in gray:

• cpanel
• direct
• ghs.google.com
• mail and webmail
• mysql
• nameservers (NS1,NS2)
• secure (until you enable CloudFlare SSL)

Can I activate CloudFlare for a wildcard subdomain?

No, for security reasons CloudFlare does not route traffic to this sub-domain. You must explicitly include the sub-domain as a CNAME in your DNS records to be able to activate CloudFlare.

Can I enable CloudFlare on my root domain (eg mywebsite.com) as an A record?

If you activate CloudFlare through your website, it will only be able to accelerate and protect the CNAME, not the A records that the root domain typically contains. If you have traffic going to the root domain and would like to speed up and protect it with CloudFlare, you can add a redirect to "www" in your .htaccess file. It is advisable to work through the site, but in general terms the redirection code looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
# Rewrite added for CloudflareInstall - mysite.com
#Wednesday 25th of August 2010 04:59:42 AM
RewriteCond %(HTTP_HOST) ^mysite.com$
RewriteCond %(SERVER_PORT) ^80$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1

I activated CloudFlare through my account website. Can I also get an account on CloudFlare.com? What is the difference between them?

As soon as you activate CloudFlare on your site, you automatically receive an account on www.cloudflare.com. To see all the statistics, the threat protection dashboard and all CloudFlare settings, you need to log in to your account on www.cloudflare.com.

Note: Your initial temporary password is sent to you in the welcome email.

I tried using CloudFlare, but I had problems. What should I do?

When you activate CloudFlare, there will be no visible changes to your website. But if the site loading becomes slower after connecting CloudFlare, then problems really exist. First of all, deactivate CloudFlare by clicking on the orange marker until it changes to gray. The team of this portal will work through your application and resolve any difficulties.

Cloudflare.com - many webmasters know this CDN service, which is one of the few that provides its services (in limited mode, really) FREE. I have also been using the services of this service for a long time, but today the hour has come for IKS. Why did I decide to stop using Cloudflare?

Today I received a letter from this excellent service, which allows you to do a site audit for free - and I did it for my site https://aliprofi.ru. Among some errors I saw this:

My white and fluffy site about Aliexpress is on the list of prohibited sites! But how could this happen? I started checking my site by domain name in the register of prohibited sites- he wasn’t there. Then I decided to check the site by IP, which can be found in any service:

It showed the address 104.28.22.165 - but this is not the address of my server, but the address of Cloudflare. My address is completely different - 185.58.207.192:

I decided to check this IP in the registry of prohibited sites and immediately received an answer to my question:

My site ended up sharing the same IP with some blocked site and came under attack. This means that in Russia many people will not be able to access it, since their provider blocks access to it.

One consolation is that not all providers strictly follow this list. In January of this year, I had the same story with a site about Linux. I came to visit Russia and was surprised to find that my site was blocked by one of the providers for the same reason.

What can be concluded? You need to either refuse cloudflare services or switch to paid tariff, since there most likely (not sure) you can get a static IP that is not blocked in Russia.

This is the story, I decided to warn you so that this does not happen to you. By the way, this same site of mine was blocked on the VKontakte network, I just corresponded with them yesterday:

Maybe he was blocked for the same reason? Or maybe not, but one way or another I discovered and solved the problem in time, and that makes me happy!

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1. Payoneer- The world's most popular payment system for freelancers. Issues cards, located in the USA.

2. EpayService- The American payment system, very popular in many countries, provides a MasterCard card in EVRO for free for residents of the CIS and Europe.

3. Skrill- The only payment system that works with cryptocurrencies and at the same time issues free bank cards MasterCard.

4. AdvCash- The offshore bank is located in Belize, you can open an account in dollars, euros, pounds and rubles.

5. Payeer- The headquarters of this payment system is located in Georgia, you can also open an account in dollars, euros and rubles.

Domain RU - 99 RUR Domain RF - 99 RUR

CloudFlare is a service that allows you to make your website faster by organizing caching and more secure by filtering requests similar to attacks. In this case, no special changes need to be made to the project itself. Everything is achieved by adding the site address to the service and changing the NS record for your domain. This is what I got out of it.

At the first stage, the site is added to the service and its initial scanning occurs. I will not describe how all this is done. Everything there is intuitive and you can even turn on clumsy Russian, apparently automatic translation. The service reads and remembers the current server names and offers to replace them with the proposed ones. After such a change, after some time required to update the DNS, your users actually end up not with your hoster, but with this service. He is already organizing further work. According to reviews, hashing can even be configured so that the site physically lies, and users will be given a copy of it for some time. Along the way, in the settings you select what to process. Whether only requests via http or also requests via the mail protocol, process requests from www. or not, etc. You select what needs to be cached - pages, styles, scripts, images.

A lot of features are provided for free. The interface and the idea itself look attractive.
Of course I wanted to try all this right away, which is what I did :)

The first possible disadvantage is that although they promise distributed servers, they are located abroad. If you have fast domestic hosting, you will need to look to see if the response time has become significantly worse than it was. My hosting is foreign, so this factor did not bother me.

Secondly, data about visitors is distorted. For example, the IP address saved for a comment may not be the real one, but CloudFlare itself. May not work quite correctly various scripts visitor registration. However, you can get around this by finding in the help what you need to add to php code site. But still this is already worries and work.

The third one was to enable and disable caching in the service (naturally, turning off caching in the browser) and track the site loading speed in the browser developer panel. For a couple of added sites, I honestly didn’t see any difference in loading speed. He showed the same thing online service Google Page Speed.

The fourth feature struck me on the spot. In the description, of course, it came across that bad users, spammers, would be asked to enter a captcha. What a surprise it was when, when I went to my own website instead, I saw the left page and the offer to enter the code from the recaptcha :) The fact is that I came in from the gray IP of one large city provider. Because of the very large number users on the same IP, some of which probably have viruses that support botnets, the system recognized this user as dishonest. By the way, for this address, sometimes a Yandex search with Google instead of the search result prompts you to enter a confirmation code “to make sure that you are not a robot.” Now imagine that the same user, who does not know whether his IP is gray or white, goes to the site using a link from a search engine. Instead of Russian text and the expected information, he sees something in a foreign language and a proposal to enter numbers. In my opinion, the site will close and that’s it. I managed to get rid of the captcha after disabling the security system in CloudFlare. The good thing is that the settings are applied immediately.

At this point, the desire to experiment disappeared. If the site does not have regular visitors, the main audience is users from search engines, feedback and you don’t have to wait for any reports of malfunctions, you can just see a drop in traffic after a while.

I have an opinion that for small and medium-sized projects, if the hosting is adequate, there is definitely no need to use CloudFlare and similar services. In my opinion, there are more problems than advantages. For big projects when there are complaints from the hoster about heavy load, attacks, proposals to switch to a dedicated server (or already on it) it is necessary for some time, before and after connecting, to analyze the server load according to such parameters as response speed, CPU time spent, load on the database. Use the service if there is a real improvement in specific numbers from the hosting side. So, after my experiment, the CloudFlare statistics show the No amount of saved traffic and the number of blocked entrances to the site. But what's the point if there is no increase over time? The user still has to load traffic, not from one place to another. And the reflected attacks are my own attempts to enter the site :) Of course this is mine personal experience and a review of CloudFlare. If anyone has any examples good use, preferably with specific numbers, it will be very interesting to hear them.

Not only CDN in its pure form, but also many others additional features, which can be useful for sites of any subject.

So first of all, CloudFlare is a free (there are different plans) CDN. But besides all this, it is also a caching proxy, has protection against attacks and many additional useful features.

CDN

CloudFlare servers are located in 23 cities around the world. This allows your content to be loaded from the area closest to the visitor. Of course, you will immediately say that CloudFlare does not have a single data center in Russia. But, as you will understand later, this is not such a big problem.

Optimizer

It is thanks to CloudFlare optimizer that even users from Russia will be able to notice a significant increase in the speed of your site. CloudFlare caches all static and dynamic content on your site and serves it to visitors asynchronously. The technology of minimizing scripts and CSS is also used along the way. Also, if possible, the browser's local storage is used. In this case, CloudFlare primarily relies on your server’s cache settings.

Attack protection

CloudFlare offers protection against DDOS attacks even for free accounts. Moreover, this is done with just one button; you do not need any special knowledge for this.

Connecting a CDN for your domain

This is done very easily and literally in two minutes.

You simply enter your website address and click Add Website. Next, CloudFlare will tell you which DNS records you need to replace. Once the DNS for your domain is updated, CloudFlare will work on your site. That's all the setup.

Caching

CloudFlare offers fine settings caching your content.

I’ll say right away that even with maximum settings caching and optimization, you can safely update your scripts and CSS. Of course, if your server correctly configures their caching settings. You can also enable development mode in the CloudFlare control panel. It works for three hours after being turned on, and during this period you will see all changes on the site in real time.

If you think that the increase in speed from all these actions is minimal and you don’t need it, then I’ll just show you two screenshots:

Attack protection

You can enable protection against DDOS and other attacks for your website. In this case (depending on the settings), all “suspects” when entering your site will have to solve a captcha on a special page.

This way you can enable email obfuscation, hot linking ban and content theft. You can also hide sensitive information from possible spammers and other unwanted persons, and ordinary visitors will be able to read it.

Pleasant trifles

Among other things, CloudFlare has so-called applications. You can, for example, enable a message for users of older versions of IE that their browser is out of date. In this case, you do not need to add anything to the site code. This, like any other application, can be turned on and off simply by pressing one button.

• A Better Browser - turns on/off the message about outdated version IE;
• CodeGuard - daily backup of your site;
• Google Analytics - automatically adds a Google Analytics script to all pages of your site;
• ScrapeShield - additional protection of your content from theft.

As a result

Saving traffic on the server

Lots of options, help with transferring, and much more.
I would like to start with the fact that this service can be used for free. CloudFlare provides PRO features, but I personally don’t need these features. The cost of PRO is quite high - $20 per month.

What does CloudFlare offer us?

• An excellent transfer system - the service analyzes your current settings and completely copies them to itself.
• Site protection and caching at the DNS level.
• Its own system statistics.
• Lots of applications to integrate.

Transfer system

I can confidently say that even a child can handle the carrying system. You simply enter your website address and click big green button. Within a minute, your site is analyzed and then all previous ones are displayed on the page DNS settings. It is also suggested to change/add some values ​​if something is suddenly transferred incorrectly. What's the plus? Everything is very simple, your site will be transferred and will not be idle. Your users won't even notice any changes.

Site protection

There are two items in the settings: Basic Security Level and Advanced Security (available only for PRO). Basic Security looks for the most threatening (?) visitors. By what algorithms and methods - I could not understand, but none of the users complained that they were considered “threatening”. With Advanced Security everything is clearer - it protects against possible SQL-Injection and XSS attacks using URL analysis. If you are not sure about the security of your sites, then it may make sense to use this system (although of course it is better to review the script code). By the way, the system can add a variable to determine the location: HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY. You can call it from Perl: $country_code = $ENV("HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY"); or from PHP: $country_code = $_SERVER["HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY"];

Site caching

The caching system allows automatic mode cache most static resources, such as css files, js scripts and images. There are two types of caching - Basic and Aggressive, the second one considers example.com/pic.jpg and example.com/pic.jpg?foo=bar different pictures. There is a possibility of automatic minimization - the system applies to JS, CSS and HTML files.

Statistics

Its own statistics are quite powerful tool. There is some limitation - in free accounts it is updated once every 24 hours, in PRO - once every 15 minutes. Both visitors and search bots are analyzed. It also displays how many requests and how much traffic CloudFlare helped compress. We haven’t forgotten about the graphs; when you don’t want to perform analysis, you can just look at beautiful graph and see the development of your site.

Application integration

There are many integration applications available third party services statistics - for example Clicky, which analyzes great amount parameters, including visit time, transitions from search engines and much more. Website monitoring systems are available, such as Monitis and Pingdom. Notifications via SMS, Twitter or email. mail can now be set up within 5 minutes. In my opinion, the most useful thing among these applications is the CodeGuard service. It completely “backs up” your site and if it is not available, it shows its saved copy. You can use this service for free if your site takes up less than 1 GB. By the way, it was CloudFlare that hosted the website of the notorious LulzSec, and it was CodeGuard that showed the pages when the LulzSec server crashed.

Conclusion

CloudFlare is truly a very convenient service. Agree, protecting the site, forgetting about caching, setting statistics and not wasting your nerves if the site is unavailable, simply moving the site to other DNSs is great. And if almost all of these features can be used for free, then such a service is just a fairy tale :)

P.S.: To avoid stupid accusations that the post was paid for, I will immediately say that I have nothing to do with the CloudFlare website and the CloudFlare, Inc. company. (US).

UPD: The header was indeed incorrect; this is not DNS hosting, but a CDN proxy that passes traffic through itself.