Cloudflare is a CDN, or content delivery network that provides proxy servers across a network of data centers worldwide to aide in increasing site speed and performance as well as site security. Cloudflare was created in 2009 as a means to stop spammers from harvesting email addresses from websites, and is currently being utilized by approximately 25 million internet properties and increases by over 10,000 new users each day. We consider it to be a very important tool.
In the most simple of terms, Cloudflare is the middle point of many server functions for a wide variety of clients. One of the things that Cloudflare does is improve site load times and reduces bandwidth costs through caching and optimization. Instead of your servers loading and serving content to your users who are accessing your site, they are instead served a cached and compressed version of your site's content, which is stored on one of their 155 data centers across 75 countries, meaning not only does that leave your server open for other resources, it also increases load times by choosing the data center closest to the user loading the data, meaning they get their content quicker. While a few seconds in increased load time doesn't sound like a huge deal, it has been found that 47% of people expect a desktop website to load in two seconds and 64% of mobile users expect a website to load in four seconds, meaning if a site takes longer to load, they are likely to leave. These minor delays can lead to an 11% loss in page views, which can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions. Sites using Cloudflare for their content management needs load twice as fast, have a reduced latency of 35% on average, reduced connection errors by 27%, and use on average 60% less bandwidth, meaning users will be more likely to spend time on your site than they would a website that takes longer to load or that has errors when loading. Since Google considers speed a determining factor in page ranking, this optimization could mean more users accessing your site, meaning more customers.
Another way that Cloudflare acts as an intermediary in server functions is their state of the art security against ddos attacks, sql injection, botware, comment spam, and more. These attacks, particularly ddos, cause site disruptions and down time by overwhelming the server with server requests. When Cloudflare detects such an attack, because your origin server is not exposed on the public internet, Cloudflare is able to simply mitigate the malicious traffic and continue serving your site to your users. This level of security is considered so valuable and trusted that it is used to protect the United States official election websites via Cloudflare's Project Athenian. For organizations that work for the arts, human rights, civil society or democracy, Cloudflare offers their highest level of security, via Project Galileo. One of the best facts and simplest to explain though is simply that Cloudflare protects their user's assets by blocking 72 billion threats per day on average.
Cloudflare is widely trusted for content delivery network needs, as they serve an average of 25 million requests per second throughout the over twelve million domains utilizing their services; among these is nearly 17% of all Fortune 1000 companies. In total, Cloudflare hosts a market share of 37% of all managed DNS domains. Cloudflare serves more web traffic than any competing service, serving more traffic than Amazon, Instagram, Wikipedia, Bing, Apple, and Twitter combined. Even though you may have never even heard of Cloudflare, the average internet user interacts with sites powered by Cloudflare more than 500 times per week. Crunchbase, Zendesk, Lending Tree, Quizlet, Panasonic, Mozilla, OkCupid, Digital Ocean, Upwork, Thredup, Discord, Sony Music, Eurovision, Tinyurl, Digg, Pexels, Crunchyroll, 23andMe, Garmin, and Shopify are just a small number of satisfied users of Cloudflare.
If you are ready to start talking about how we can use our skills using these tools to help you accomplish your website goals, contact us! Vhical is located in the New Albany, Southern Indiana and Louisville, Kentucky area, but we are available to help anyone, anywhere!