How would you like to speed up your site performance as well as protect your site from spammers and attackers? Oh, and do it for free too. Although this probably sounds too good to be true, a new service called CloudFlare claims to do all this an more. According to CloudFlare, on average, a website using their service will load 30% faster, use 60% less bandwidth as well as being way more secure. All you need to do is make a simple change to the DNS settings on your registrar, and you can start experiencing these benefits right away.
Getting Setup With CloudFlare
Does CloudFlare work? Well I decided to test it for myself on this very site.
Signing up for an account is very simple. Just enter in your email, username and password.
You then need to go through a 4-step wizard.
Step 1 instructs you to enter in your domain name.
CloudFlare will then scan your current DNS setup. This takes about 60 seconds, and during this time, you get a nice introduction to how CloudFlare works. Steps 2 and 3 then allow you to edit the settings that it has found and Step 3, allows you to configure your CloudFlare settings.
Finally Step 4 tells you to to update your name servers. For most people, this is probably the only step you have to worry about.
Since my domain is registered over at Namecheap, I had to go over there to change the name server settings from their control panel. So instead of pointing to my existing web host’s name servers, they now point to the CloudFlare name server instead.
That’s pretty much it, your website will then be added to your CloudFlare account.
From your CloudFlare account, you will now be able to see real time analytics for your site. While this is not really a replacement for Google Analytics or similar service, it is interesting in the fact that it shows what threats have been blocked and what resources have been saved while using CloudFlare.
Keep in mind though, it can take up to 24 hours for CloudFlare to start speeding up and protecting your site as it takes time for your name server settings to propagate.
Lastly, if you are using WordPress like this blog is, make sure to install the CloudFlare WordPress plugin. This will restore your original visitor IP addresses to your WordPress logs (instead of showing CloudFlare’s proxy IPs). It also optimizes your server database and ensures that everything is running smoothly.
As you can see, CloudFlare is quite simple to setup and use. It’s completely free, so why not try it and speed up and protect your site?
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