CloudFlare is a free system which acts as a proxy (intermediary) between website visitors and the server. By acting as a proxy, CloudFlare temporarily stores static content from the site, which decreases the number of requests to the server but still allows visitors to access the site.
How is it enabled?
CloudFlare can be enabled directly from your cPanel, provided by your web hosting, the icon is located under the "Software / Services" section, you simply have to select it to later register the account, and that's it!
Remember that you must define your domain to work with www. If your domain still works equally well from www. or without www, we recommend adding the following lines to your .htaccess file so that the domain is redirected from without www to with www:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} domain\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.domain\.com\/$1" [ R=301,L]
This way you will also possibly avoid Google from penalizing you for duplicity of content.
Considerations to take into account:
- After activating cloudflare you will have to access your cpanel through the cpanel subdomain: http://cpanel.yourdomain.com
- After activating cloudflare you must access your webmail through the webmail subdomain: http://webmail.yourdomain.com
Advantages of the CloudFlare system
- Improved Site Performance: CloudFlare has proxy servers located around the world. The proxy servers are located near the visitors, so they will be able to load the site faster directly from the proxy servers. "The faster a site loads, the longer the visitor will stay on it."
- Threat and Bot Protection: CloudFlare uses data from Project Honey Pot and other third-party sources, as well as data from its community to identify malicious threats and stop attacks before they arrive to the sites. You can see the threats that are being stopped through CloudFlare from: https://www.cloudflare.com/your-websites.html
- "Comment Spam" Protection: CloudFlare uses data from third-party sources to reduce the number of "comment spam" on the site.
- Alert Visitors to Infected Computers: CloudFlare alerts visitors when they access from an infected computer so that they can take immediate action. The visitor will be able to enter a "Captcha" to enter the site.
- Offline Browsing Mode: In the event that our servers are not available, visitors will still be able to access the site since CloudFlare will serve the site from its CDN.
- Decreased CPU Usage: Since there would be fewer requests to our servers, this will decrease the CPU consumption of each account.
- New Site Statistics: With CloudFlare you will be able to have tools to evaluate the traffic of visitors to the site and will also have statistics for "search tool crawlers" and threats.
Limitations of CloudFlare
- Currently, requests must be redirected to www.$domain instead of $domain (which may mean some configuration changes must be made).
- CloudFlare may affect some internal statistics programs that directly read Apache logs. CloudFlare will not affect web-based analytics programs that use Javascript or Google Analytics. While the logs will reflect fewer requests to the server and less load, the experience for site visitors will remain the same.
- CloudFlare saves static site content. This reduces the load on the server and means that if a change is made to an existing static file such as an image, there may be a small delay while the change appears. *While doing an update you can configure CloudFlare in Development Mode so that the change appears immediately.*
