Cloudflare Review : Free CDN

Here’s the indepth and updated Cloudflare review for 2013. Cloudflare is one of the most amazing free CDN service available for every webmaster and blogger. You can use its features for free, for which you might be needing to pay almost $300 to $500. Since it’s not just a simple content delivery network, but its much more than that.

It offers with whole bunch of options for website protection, prevention from DDos attacks, Sql injection, Hotlinking, real-time analytic and lots of app integration to enhance your web and blogging experience.

Currently I am also using their service and must say that they are helping me reduce my bandwidth usage, my website requests and finally protecting my site from hackers and spammers.

Cloudflare is actually very famous for their 5 minutes integration and easy to startup process. You don’t need to install anything, and you even don’t need to create any Cname. It can automatically scan your DNS records and will finally tell you to change your name servers to the one provided by them.

Now once the DNS propagation complete which usually takes 4 to 8 hours, the traffic will then pass from cloudflare and will get much high-speed and will notice much better performance.

Currently their service is having 23 different data centers all across the world. Including the one in the Asia region. So it simply means, that you website will not be served from one single data center, but will be served dynamically from all those 23 nodes. And you get all these for free.

So Lets Begin Our Cloudflare Review

Web content optimization

CloudFlare automatically optimizes your page content so as to increase you page response. It takes cares that third-party plugins and scripts doesn’t slow down your blog or website. For example, if you are using Adsense or using any custom Typekit font, then it will automatically optimize then, so that they won’t affect your blog or website response time.

It uses local storage caching, in which it stores the important modules which helps to run a blog or website locally into the visitors mobile, iPad, laptops or computers. But remember that cache are not stored on your server, but are distributed to many different server’s all around the world.

Auto-Minify

This service also provides Auto-Minify features which helps to remove the unnecessary HTML, CSS, JavaScript characters and spaces and finally reduce their 20% of size. Now this is something unique. You don’t need to install any minification plugin on your server, so better hosting performance.

Aggressive GZIP Compression

CloudFlare CDN helps compressing your website to almost half of its original size. It actually generates the static HTML files of your dynamic webpages. This dramatically reduces the page load time, reduces the initial sever load, and with this CDN your blog gets accelerated to almost 200%.

You can also use server-based caching system to serve your contents more fast. Try to use popular caching plugins like W3total, WP-Super cache and others.

Browser optimization

Every browsers works little differently as compared to other one. Google chrome, whenever we open any new tab; a new chrome process starts. In Firefox, the resources increases as we create new tabs, similarly they work for internet, different browsers have different ways to show the content on webpage.

Cloudflare optimize your blog or website so that it works on almost all browsers. In simple terms it makes your website cross browser compatible.

Mobile Friendly

Having a responsive design is the next biggest trend on web. Today almost every business and website is trying to create their responsive design.

Cloudflare make your blog optimized for almost every browser and for every screen. You will see a real growth of visitors after using this service. Actually it makes every cache page mobile responsive, so that this service won’t hurt your community.

Security Options

Cloudflare helps in protecting your blog from all types of upcoming dangers and hackers. It protects your blog from DDoS attacks, SQL injection. Cloudflare uses its advance security scanning system, and when it finds any new attack or thinks that a new attack may arrive from that place, it starts preparing for block it for your blog and also for the whole of the community.

Cloudflare Security Level Settings :

It has a good list of security levels which you can use. Just click on them and the security settings is implemented on to your blog automatically. You also have control on custom page rules. These rules contain the information like, the list of users to allow access to your blog without verification, spam list and many more. Now it automatically get reset to use those predefined security features. With help of these settings  it will  prevent your blog from upcoming dangers and saves your bandwidth and also system resources.

Cloudflare also uses browser integrity check to see whither the upcoming visitor have threat signatures or not. If found, then the blog is not served to him. This CDN is very intelligent and uses different sources to build the visitor reputation and see whither he is suitable for viewing your blog or not. It also creates blacklist and white list of the visitors who had arrived to your blog.

Just 2 to 3 months before, not tracker was able to detect cloudflare. But in the last 3 to 5 months, this service have become very popular due to its large community base and also because of its features. It have also integrated with W3Total cache plugin. Now you have to just add your accounts API, email and site name. And your W3 total cache is ready to rock. It also provides its own plugin for wordpress. This plugin helps to repair your MySQL database for better usage. But remember that you cannot setup this service with WP supercache.

I wish you would have liked my Cloudflare review. Please leave your suggestion and comments on this CDN.