Cloudflare Review

Fast And Global Content Delivery Network

Cloudflare introduces a fast and global content delivery network that accelerates Internet applications and mobile experiences, and ensures application availability. In general, a content delivery network or CDN is a network of proxy servers and data centers that are distributed across geographic locations. Cloudflare’s content delivery network is comprised of 119 data centers that are distributed across 58 countries. With such global network infrastructure, latency is reduced and assets are delivered as close as geographically possible to visitors.

Improve Visitor Experiences Through Load Balancing

Access to websites, apps, and APIs is affected by the reliability and performance of servers. When servers are misconfigured or over-utilized, visitors may experience slow load times or may not be able to access the websites, apps, or APIs at all. Because of this, Cloudflare offers a component of its global network infrastructure called load balancing to prevent poor visitor experiences due to unreliable or misconfigured servers.

Load balancing is a method of distributing the workload and traffic across multiple servers. For instance, when a server is down, visitors can still access the same content typically delivered by such server by routing them to backend servers. Cloudflare’s load balancing capability ensures that visitors are routed to servers that are closest to their region and can respond to their requests.

Web Content Optimization

Aside from helping users bring content closer to their visitors, Cloudflare assists them in making sure their website and its pages are optimized quickly and efficiently for whatever device visitors are surfing from. For instance, it uses the local storage on modern browsers and mobile devices to cache the objects that are needed to achieve the best rendering of a website. Also, Cloudflare removes those unnecessary characters from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to reduce the file size of source code on a website.

Enterprise-Class Web Application Firewall

Cloudflare is also equipped with security capabilities which are aimed at detecting and fighting the most sophisticated types of attacks that degrade the performance and availability of websites and applications, compromise customer information, and damage Internet properties. It has an enterprise-class web application firewall (WAF) that continuously identifies and blocks new potential threats. In addition, Cloudfare’s WAF applies rules that are automatically updated whenever new security threats and vulnerabilities are discovered.

Rate Limiting

The network security solution protects websites, applications, and APIs from DDoS attacks through the aid of its rate limiting capability. Rate limiting lets users control and block suspicious visitors by enabling them to define thresholds or limits for requests sent by visitors, set up custom responses that are triggered when visitors hit those thresholds, and gain insights into traffic patterns.

Add Security To DNS

Summing it up, Cloudflare uses DNSSEC, a protocol that adds a layer of security to a DNS by ensuring that visitors who are visiting a domain are able to receive content or information that originates from its authoritative web server. Thus, it guarantees that traffic is routed to the correct servers and not intercepted by attackers. As a result, phishing, malware infections, and personal data leakage will be prevented.