Cloudflare operates a highly open global content distribution network with security controls built into all layers and lightning-fast clocks daily.
The concept of combining web security and performance improvement into a CDN is relatively new, and few products offer these two features. Cloudflare speeds up and defends the site from security threats.
According to Cloudflare, a website with CloudFlare loads twice as fast on average uses 60% less bandwidth, 65% less demand, and is safer.
The cheapest CDN plan of CloudFlare is 0.00 a month (i.e. free!). Cloudflare has made over 2 million websites worldwide faster and more reliable so far. Join today. Enter today.
About Cloudflare CDN Company
Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway formed CloudFlare in 2009. While Cloudflare has begun as a project aimed at preventing spammers from retrieving email addresses on websites, the company focused on web security solutions in 2009.
With time, founders of Cloudflare realized that security software was a factor behind the success of slow pages. This prompted the development team to find ways to boost site efficiency while providing good Internet security at the same time.
This is how the website caching, web protection, and content delivery network that we all know as CloudFlare was born.
What Is Cloudflare CDN?
Cloudflare is a network for content distribution that also offers DDos protection and enhanced website security on your site.
You get an improvement in both website security and efficiency Whether you like it or not, the development of Cloudflare was a kind of accident.
Originally, its creators, Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway, were trying to develop a method to stop spammers from gathering emails from websites.
However, the curious side effect of their caching and edge network technologies was that beta testing companies saw a 30 % increase in page loading times.
In order to keep this review brief, we will only concentrate on how Cloudflare can help you with page speed.
There are a variety of security features, but most of them are allowed by default, so you don’t have to think about them.
And now that you know where it came from, it’s time for our analysis to get stuck.
What is Cloudflare used for?
Cloudflare offers a suite of Website Speed and Security Optimization products. The aim of this review is to reduce the loading times of the site by serving as an intermediary between website servers and visitors. The CDN also provides health advantages.
How The Cloudflare CDN Works?
- Imagine that your web hosting business is based in Texas, but the bulk of your customers are in France.
- The longer it takes to load your data into a browser, the more your data traverses multiple networks.
- This may only be 5 seconds more, but it’s longer than most web searchers are able to wait.
- The answer is to include a copy of your content to your foreign visitors at a data center with an IP address near them.
- You may also sign up for a network of content distribution with data centers in or near France.
- The next time a French visitor visits your website, a copy has now been saved (cached) in the French data center of the CDN.
- This significantly improves your visitors’ website efficiency.
- The findings of Cloudflare are possible as it uses a reverse proxy strategy to provide content to an international audience.
Cloudflare CDN Networks
Cloudflare definitely has a detailed list of Presence Points (PoPs). Their servers are well represented in the United States, EU, China, and the Asia Pacific. At present, its network consists of 100 data centers worldwide. Below are both their web presence on a world map and a list of the positions of each site.
How Cloudflare CDN Speeds up Your site speed?
In data centers all over the world, copies of your website are cached. Your site is connected to tourists from the closest geographical area. When the organization reads, it notes that there are more than 150 data centers worldwide.
Cloudflare uses a patented platform called Anycast to connect the guests from their current position to the nearest data center. In addition, this causes your cached website to run twice the normal load time. As an added bonus, CloudFlare optimizes visitor site speed in an IPv6 network even if the old IPv4 infrastructure remains in your server environment.
Cloudflare CDN Features
Cloudflare provides a variety of additional features you can use to speed up content delivery, increase protection, etc. The following list provides a summary of the list of features currently offered and not given by Cloudflare. Within the next section we will discuss in more detail the key features of every Cloudflare scheme.
| Feature | Supported? |
|---|---|
| Origin Pull | Yes |
| Instant Purge | Yes |
| API | Yes |
| ALPN | Yes |
| Gzip | Yes |
| HTTP/2 | Yes |
| Cloudflare SSL | Yes |
| Raw Logs | Yes (Only with enterprise plan) |
| Custom SSL | Yes (Only with business of enterprise plans) |
| DDoS Protection | Yes (Basic protection with free plan) |
| Free Support | Yes (Varies based on plan) |
| Custom Rules | Yes (Varies based on plans) |
| Real-time Statistics | No (Updated every 24 hours) |
| Origin Shield | No |
| Secure Token | No |
| Origin Push | No |
| Let’s Encrypt SSL | No |
Cloudflare CDN Pricing
Cloudflare offers a free plan, unlike many other CDN providers. Essentially, you don’t pay for bandwidth usage with Cloudflare but pay for additional features as mentioned below. The pricing of Cloudflare is based on a flat monthly rate and is defined as follows.
| Free Plan | Pro Plan | Business Plan | Enterprise Plan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 / mo | $20 / mo | $200 / mo | Starts at $5,000 / mo |
As the price of Cloudflare is based on a monthly charge, you will move to the next plan if a specific feature is to be used. There is no option to purchase a feature separately.
The following is a description of the important features of each form of program. Visit their feature comparison page to display a complete list of features included in each package.
| Free Plan | Pro Plan | Business Plan | Enterprise Plan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instant Cache Purge | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| IPv6 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| HTTP/2 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Basic DDoS Protection | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Anycast DNS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Email Support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| WAF | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile Optimization | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Image Optimization | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Page Rules | 3 | 20 | 50 | 100 |
| SSL Certificate | CF-issued | CF-issued | CF-issued / Custom | CF-issued / Custom |
| Advanced DDos | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| China Networks | No | No | No | Yes |
| Purge by Tag | No | No | No | Yes |
| Phone Support | No | No | No | Yes |
Cloudflare Free Vs Paid Plans Reviews
Users are happy to learn that Cloudflare provides both a free edition and many paid plans when it comes to pricing. The free plan provides full access to global CDNs, a wide variety of security features, SSL encryption, and efficient site traffic statistics. There are however a few safeguards, such as weekly website crawls, an activation period, and analytical updates that take effect 24 hours later.
At the other hand, the payment plans of CloudFlare, namely Pro, Company, and Enterprise, provide better security for the web, more web crawling, mobile optimization, and DDoS security.
Whilst the free plan offers basic security, Cloudflare recommends its paid entrance plan for qualified websites.
There are situations in which you can need the paid schedule, but below are the following:
Cloudflare CDN Review Conclusion
In summary, we may conclude that this CDN provider certainly provides comprehensive global coverage to our Cloudflare analysis. They are well funded and one of the largest CDN providers offering a free plan. If, however, you need an extra feature, there is no choice to pay for that feature alone or to pay per GB of traffic. Therefore, you have to pay $20 a month, irrespective of your traffic level, if your website only generates a slightly limited amount of traffic, but you need a feature of the Pro plan.
In general, selecting Cloudflare as a CDN provider really depends on the required features and the traffic created by your website. A free plan is definitely a common option for those who are not yet ready to start paying for a CDN supplier but may limit your customizability and functions.
