Is Cloudflare Worth It? Let me tell you!

Cloudflare is Free Service that offers Content Distribution, DNS Management and Threat Blocking as its main features although there are a number of other useful features you can enable in the Cloudflare dashboard.

By taking over your DNS records Cloudflare routes traffic through its global network of servers based in the origin of traffic so as to pass static content from your site to your users at the closest geo-location.

I have been testing Cloudflare out for several months now and I feel that it has some really solid features and could be a very resourceful service to many site owners. Cloudflare has had a few episodes of downtime as a result of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and due to some technical issues on their own network.

In my opinion and based on extensive load testing and analysis I feel that most websites that already use performance plug-ins such as W3 Total Cache with a CDN (Content Distribution Network) that you are not likely to see improvements in website load times and may in fact in some cases see slower load times.

Although for people who do not yet use such plug-ins and a CDN you will definitely see an improvement in load times if you switch to Cloudflare.

I definitely encourage anyone who lacks a CDN or caching to checkout Cloudflare and I do think that the service will improve over time as their network grows and they fine tune their service.

Features of CloudFlare:

• Site Performance: Cloudflare uses a huge network of global servers which cache content from your original site and then when visitors type in your web address they are routed to the closest server and served cached content which means faster load times.

• Threat Reduction: Cloudflare uses identifiers from a variety of sources to block abusive traffic and spammers from ever reaching your site.

• Always Online Mode: If your server or webhosting provider ever has an outage Cloudflare can keep your site online by serving 100% of your cached content to visitors.

• Reduced CPU and Memory Consumption: Since Cloudflare takes over a portion of content serving this saves CPU and Memory consumption on your server or webhosting providers servers.

• Friendly Statistics: Cloudflare provides insightful statistics on your visitors including search engines all from the Cloudflare Dashboard.