Cloudflare is one of the leading providers of web performance and security platforms. It can help businesses of all sizes in speeding up and protecting their website, SaaS services, APIs and other resources related to the internet. This software solution combines web security and performance enhancement into your content delivery network.
With Cloudflare, you get to benefit from the following: free DDoS protection and business-grade DNS and CDN services. You’re also provided with multiple products and features to optimize your website speed and security.
These products range from stream delivery and magic transit to bot management and analytics.
Not only does Cloudflare increase the speed of your websites but it also blocks threats that are designed to compromise websites, waste bandwidth and deplete server resources.
Its security features help protect against spamming, DDoS attacks and SQL injections. Overall, with the help of Cloudflare, you can rest easy while enjoying faster internet speed and powerful security benefits.
Cloudflare Features
Cloudflare has many features that can help businesses, including:
Performance And Reliability
This category is Cloudflare’s top priority. You’ll find several features under this category such as CDN and DNS services, Argo Smart Routing, Load Balancing, AMP Real URL and web optimizations. These tools are designed to ensure optimal performance.
Many industries can benefit from this solution such as freelancers with personal websites, small businesses selling their products through an online shop and large enterprises with SaaS solutions.
Video Streaming and Delivery
Under this category, you get to use Cloudflare Stream and Stream Delivery in providing better video streaming options for your websites. This gives you shorter video startup and buffering times. This ensures an increase in customer engagement and bandwidth savings as Cloudflare’s network ensures reduced requests to an origin server.
Advanced Security
Cloudflare offers multiple security options to ensure malicious threats and suspicious activity are blocked. Examples are Magic Transit, WAF, bot management, SSL / TLS certificates and Argo Tunnel. With these tools, you don’t have to worry about bots or threats crawling through your websites, DDoS attacks, cross-site scripting, comment spamming and SQL injections.
In-depth Insights
While Cloudflare focuses primarily on security and performance optimization, it also has tools focused on gathering data-driven insights. With Cloudflare Analytics, you benefit from deep insights and intelligence that you can use to further the state of your internet property.
You can also view trends, optimize configuration, create custom analytics dashboards and monitor the health of your origin server.
Cloudflare Benefits
There are also many benefits of using Cloudflare, including:
Better Security
When it comes to running a website, you need to ensure top security measures have been made to protect your data. You can experience many different breaches and data threats such as DDoS attacks, malicious bots and hackers trying to compromise sensitive customer data.
When you use public APIs or switch clouds and connect to more third-party integrations, you become at risk from more attacks. To counter these said risks, Cloudflare hosts a 200-city Anycast network that fights off volumetric attacks. It does this by learning from attacks sent on 20,000,000 internet properties.
Greater Performance
The more your business thrives, the more you’re expected to reach higher standards and cater to demands from your customers. You need a platform that focuses on capturing more prospects, capturing more leads and improving engagements from your audience.
Cloudflare offers features to accelerate both internet applications and mobile experiences and ensure your applications can be accessed by the general public. Having more people check out your website can lead to unsustainable traffic and unavailable infrastructure.
To stop this from happening, Cloudflare identifies what the best resource is to use from your server by monitoring network latency and server health.
More Reliability
With its DNS service and predictable bandwidth costs, Cloudflare lets you rely on thousands of machines across the globe to run your website. This ensures your applications stay running and also protects your internet properties from malicious requests.
Cloudflare Pricing
For those who want to try out Cloudflare’s system, you can choose between four pricing packages. These packages are catered to different industries and offer varying levels of functionalities. Cloudflare claims that in their pricing bundles, performance and security are top priorities.
Free
This package is suitable for individuals who are running personal websites and who want to check out Cloudflare’s features and functionalities. You don’t have to pay to benefit from the following features: shared SSL certificates, global content delivery network and unmetered mitigation of DDoS attacks.
It’s a good place to start if you want to increase security measures and the overall speed of your networks.
Pro
Priced at $20.00 per month, the second plan offers faster internet speed and additional features to add to the existing ones found in the previous version. This is catered primarily for people who are looking to enhance their security and performance in their professional websites, portfolios or blogs.
With tools such as web application firewalls, image and mobile optimization and HTTP/2 prioritization, users are given more control over advanced features all designed to ensure your websites are working faster and in a more secure manner.
Business
The third plan is priced at $200 per month. It’s suitable for websites and businesses that require enhanced performance, advanced security and prioritized support. With this bundle, you get to benefit from the following: 100% uptime SLA, the existing name server and 24/7, 365 chat support.
It has all the features found in the Pro plan with additional options including custom WAF rules, 100k image resizing requests and more customization options.
Enterprise
Lastly, the Enterprise plan is designed for large enterprises and enterprises that require enterprise-grade security, emergency support and improved performance. It’s customizable for maximum performance which means it doesn’t have a fixed price. You need to contact the sales team to request for a quotation. In this package, you benefit from 2500% SLA, 24/7 enterprise-grade, email, phone and chat support.
Not only do you get to use the features found in the previous plans, you also get to use advanced web application firewalls with unlimited custom rulesets, role-based account access, multiple custom SSL certificate uploads, access to raw logs and up to 10M image resizing requests.
Conclusion
As one of the top leading web performance and security platforms, Cloudflare is designed to build better internet and enhance security options for many websites and internet properties.
With powerful features to improve your CDN and DNS, high-quality video streaming options, advanced security tools and data-driven insights, it’s optimized to make your websites run faster and more efficiently.
Overall, Cloudflare is a viable option to have if you want to optimize your loading pages without paying for more than you can afford and compromising your website security.