What is CloudFlare?

Written by Arian Jahansouz Thursday, 9 August 2012

Arvixe is happy to announce a new partnership with CloudFlare, the web’s easiest performance and security solution. As a CloudFlare Certified Partner, we deliver their simple and free solution to help protect and accelerate your website. Once your website joins the CloudFlare community, it loads twice as fast and is protected from a range of online threats.

Getting started is super easy—you just need to log into your control panel and look for the CloudFlare icon. With two clicks, you can activate CloudFlare and your website will automatically be faster and safer around the world. Click here to learn how to setup CloudFlare on your Arvixe account.

To learn more about CloudFlare, you can watch the introductory video below!

With 19 data centers around the world, when you begin using CloudFlare, your traffic is directed towards their nearest data center. As your traffic passes through the data centers, CloudFlare intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic.  The static portions are cached on their servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before they check to see if they’ve been updated.  By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.

CloudFlare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, CloudFlare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers.  The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.

Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) tracked on the Internet. As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites. CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about the approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the CloudFlare community. CloudFlare analyzes the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped. In time, the goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given the scale and the billions of different attacks seen and adapted to every year, CloudFlare is well on their way to achieving that for sites on the CloudFlare network.

At Arvixe, we are delighted to offer this great service to you and help make your website faster and safer. So what are you waiting for? Setup CloudFlare on your Arvixe account and start protecting and speeding up your website today!



17 Comments

  1. Kevin Leary   |  Friday, 31 August 2012 at 10:55 am

    Good article Arian,

    Is it OK if I use a few of these points in the Blog article here: What is CloudFlare?. I want to include some of the specific statistics you touch on, for example:

    “CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) tracked on the Internet. ”

    Where did this stat come from?

  2. Arian Jahansouz   |  Saturday, 01 September 2012 at 8:35 am

    Hi Kevin,
    It is okay if you use our article as long as you cite our article as the source. We also found the statistics used in this article on CloudFlare website.

  3. Gerardo   |  Thursday, 04 October 2012 at 11:18 am

    Hi, will CloudFlare help to accelerate my website (hosted at ARVIXE – USA) to my visitors located almost 100% in Chile?, or ist it primarily usefull for US visitors? Thanks and regards

  4. julian   |  Thursday, 04 October 2012 at 12:00 pm

    Can I get to this option through the WebsitePanel or is this just in the cPanel?

  5. Lonny   |  Thursday, 04 October 2012 at 12:02 pm

    Not providing a service nor charging for anything on our websites, we rely heavily on monetization. How does this affect banner advertising, both with Google AdSense and third party ad hosts and servers? Google is very particular about its ad placements. Does CloudFlare negatively affect visitor stats like, unique IPs, referrers, entry page, hits, revisits, etc?

  6. Noah S   |  Thursday, 04 October 2012 at 3:29 pm

    Hi, Only the cPanel accounts have the icon for automatic setup. Cloudflare will work for ASP and cPanel plans. If you have an ASP account you can still set it up manually at https://www.cloudflare.com

  7. Noah S   |  Thursday, 04 October 2012 at 3:34 pm

    Hi, You can see the cloudflare locations here: https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map . While they don’t have a data center in South America yet, you most likely will still see a speed increase. Regards,

  8. Noah S   |  Thursday, 04 October 2012 at 3:42 pm

    Hi, From Cloudlflare: The basic CloudFlare setup will not impact Google AdSense at all. (the URL is that the bottom of this post. CloudFlare should not have a negative impact on your visitor stats.

    http://support.cloudflare.com/kb/top-frequently-asked-questions/does-cloudflare-impact-google-adsense

    Regards,

  9. shakun shan   |  Thursday, 04 October 2012 at 5:58 pm

    I am with VPS asp with arvixe, Whether any datacenter in India for cloudfare purpose.
    My most of the visitors will be from India.

    Is it advisable – to host my site at Indian datacenter rather at US datacenter?
    Plz clear the doubt.

  10. Corsara   |  Thursday, 04 October 2012 at 11:01 pm

    My ASP.NET website relies on people creating and updating information in their Ads, which should be usually available immediately. There is only one aspx page, and the page is built based on the parameters on the server side, then sent to the browser. Is it true to assume that in this case CludFlare is not going to be a viable option for me to use?

    Thanks in advance.

  11. Alessio   |  Friday, 05 October 2012 at 12:24 am

    The service is free? If I’m not satisfied, i can drop this service?

  12. Noah S   |  Friday, 05 October 2012 at 7:02 pm

    Hi, Their most basic service is free. You can see all their plans here: http://www.cloudflare.com/plans

  13. Noah S   |  Friday, 05 October 2012 at 7:14 pm

    Hi,

    Here is the map of the network locations.

    http://www.cloudflare.com/network-map

    Please refer to this and then check with Cloudflare. Regards,

  14. Noah S   |  Friday, 05 October 2012 at 7:21 pm

    Hi Corsara,

    Please check with CloudFlare. They will be able to answer any particular questions that you may have about the functionality and your site:

    http://www.cloudflare.com/help

    Regards,

  15. Melissa Gammons   |  Tuesday, 16 October 2012 at 12:32 pm

    I am confused about the cost of Cloudflare. Twice I have been in chat w/ billing support and first time I was told it was free, second time I was told that it was $4 after the reseller account.

    Seeking clarification: I can sign my clients up for this service for FREE. What if they want the service above the free account? Is there a discount?

  16. Noah S   |  Wednesday, 17 October 2012 at 3:02 pm

    Hi,

    Cloudflare does have a free version that they offer and paid versions. For exact details on Cloudflare pricing you will want to check with Cloudflare, unfortunately there is no discount offered by cloudflare for Arvixe customers.

    Regards,

  17. Nelson   |  Wednesday, 12 December 2012 at 12:32 pm

    Users should also know that the free CloudFlare does not work with secure sites. You need the Pro version to pass along encrypted connections.

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