I’ve been trying out a service called CloudFlare on my blog and ClickTrackProfit. The goal of CF is to add a layer of security to your website.
It blocks bots, spammers, and viruses from even getting to your server. So it’s like a firewall. But at the same time it caches your static content like images and javascripts. So it’s like a CDN.
To my surprise it’s worked very good and was incredibly easy to setup. All you do is transfer your DNS to them, and they take care of the rest. It’s like magic. It’s been working so great and easy that I thought it wasn’t doing anything!
But it is, and it’s reduced the load by about 50%. A small fraction is the bots being blocked, but the majority is the system caching content making it faster and reducing our bandwidth bill. Cool!
Without going into details, I haven’t tried it with any of our traffic exchanges. We have a unique situation where at the present time CloudFlare wouldn’t work with our setup, but I am working on it so we can. The benefits so far have been worth it!
Tim, It’s great you are experimenting with new things. One of my favorite quotes is: Everybody is in favour of progress. It’s the change they don’t like.
It’s so hard to get out of our comfortable ruts some times. Thanks for sharing about this. My daughter and niece own a company where they do support for medical practices. I’ll tell them about it in case it can help them as they live online.
As always good content. Thanks for sharing.
Take care,
Shelayne
One thing I would like to point out is that ‘easy’ could mean one thing to you Tim, and it could vary on some other people like me. I’m just stating that you’re a programmer with a lot of knowledge and tech know-how. I don’t have that much.
hehe I suppose you are right!
Great information Tim! This sounds like an edge product used to cache data… with a built in security feature. I was wondering when this was going to be more widely adopted.. ;) Many companies have an issue with edge performance and security!
Thank you,
Paul
Thanks for pointing out what was some very interesting reading Tim. Although I don’t have my own server information like this is worth keeping up to date on for a TE owner.
I’ve been using Cloudflare on numerous sites. It definitely has reduced my server load, saved bandwidth, challenged & blocked security threats. The jury is still out on consistent page speed improvement and the functionality of some of the other features.
Cloudflare is being offered by many hosts on enterprise level, so with many webhosts it can be enabled by a click in your cpanel in that case.
It can be disabled easily enough so it was worth a try on some of my sites.
I agree, the speed improvements aren’t consistent. But I can’t say it’s slowed the site down any so..