Your website is one of the most important assets for your business, which is why it’s important to ensure that it is protected and stays online for users and prospective customers. Cloudflare addresses this necessity by strengthening security and providing a safe online experience for all your site visitors.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a global cloud platform that provides services that are designed to make websites more secure, more reliable and faster. It acts as a middleman between a website user’s browser and a website’s server, with your request first going into Cloudflare’s global network, which processes the request before forwarding it to the server.
There are many aspects of Cloudflare services, with it ultimately giving an extra layer of security to your website.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Cloudflare has a network of data centres where it caches content such as the images and JavaScript on your website, storing a temporary copy of these files. When a user visits your website, the content is delivered from the server closest to them. This removes the need for these files to be freshly pulled every time a user lands on a web page, reducing time delays and speeding up page loading while also reducing strain on your server.
Security
One of Cloudflare’s primary advantages is its ability to enhance your website’s security. Cloudflare filters out large amounts of malicious traffic before it reaches the origin server; firewalls inspect incoming traffic and block common exploits or vulnerabilities, also identifying threats from malicious bots, protecting your site from content scraping and spam.
This ensures that legitimate user requests are processed efficiently, contributing to improved performance and uptime.
Health Checks
Cloudflare also monitors the origin server’s health, and can automatically direct traffic away if the servers are found to be unsatisfactory. Cloudflare does this by using automated probes that check your original servers for responsiveness and expected responses. If a server fails checks, it stops sending traffic to it to ensure that users are only directed to healthy endpoints.
Why Should You Have Cloudflare?
Cloudflare acts as a security guard in front of your server, blocking suspicious visitors and helping to give an added layer of protection to your website. This reduces the likelihood of your website being targeted or attacked by malicious activity, ensuring that your website is online for your prospective customers at all times.
Not only that, your users will experience faster loading times and content delivery, increasing satisfaction and website KPIs.
Website Support & Cloudflare Implementation
Want help with hosting your website, or want to secure your site further with Cloudflare? Ballyhoo’s secure hosting services will help you – contact us today to see how we can help.
