Webmasters Check CloudFlare Free Services Out

A fellow webmaster turned me on to CloudFlare. One of my sites is really resource heavy with huge screen captures and vids.flcdata.org After enabling CloudFlare i could see a serious improvement with it’s loading speed.

And a test with Pingdom Tools was really impressive after enabling CloudFlare.

This particular website is running WordPress with a slew of plugins and sidebar widgets. It’s a serious data hog!

To make it short and sweet ~ CloudFlair’s basic service is FREE and that’s me! All you have to do is register your account on cloudflare, then add a website to be protected and enhanced. CloudFlare also offers Pro, Business and Enterprise plans if you want more than the basic free service.

CloudFlare will scan your site to get all the DNS info needed. They then give you two name servers to point your domain to. Takes about 10 minutes to set up. The way it works is all traffic to your domain passes through the cloud before coming to you. This eliminates most scrapers and attackers. CloudFlare also protects against DdoS attacks. They also cache your pages accelerating your page views. I’m really impressed!

From CloudFlare’s Overview page: CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

CloudFlare’s system gets faster and smarter as our community of users grows larger. We have designed the system to scale with our goal in mind: helping power and protect the entire Internet. CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain, regardless of your choice in platform. From start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. Adding your website requires only a simple change to your domain’s DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site’s existing code. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. Our core service is free and we offer enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting and much more.

Join CloudFlare today and be part of the community that is creating a better web.

I’ve been using this service for a few days, and as you can see the resource savings in the below graph: 21,528 requests saved, and 908MB saved by CloudFlare.

The Net is a jungle of rouge bots and content scrapers that are stealing your content daily. Give em the Bums Rush by running your site through CloudFlare! 😉