Cloudflare – How It Works and How it can help your website | With Real-Life Examples.

This article is for you if:-

• You want to prevent your website from getting hacked frequently or
• You want to keep your website more secure or
• Your website is built in WordPress.

These days every business has a website, and hackers are keep on looking for a week link to hijack the website and ask for ransom money or use your server for other purposes, which can cause you a lot of trouble.

The same has happened to me with my websites, which caused me a bit of inconvenience (the Hosting Provider had blocked my access to the server).

But instead of paying ransom money, I turned down the server and started another one. I was able to do this because I had a complete backup of code and data (Not only on the server but on my Google Drive, Dropbox, and PC Hard Drive as well). Why I said, that is because while making backup strategies, you should plan in such a way that you have backups at multiple locations. (Click here if you want to know about my backup strategies)

While searching about ways to improve the security of my server, I learned about Cloudflare, which is an extremely useful platform and amazingly easy to work with. I have moved DNS of all my and Gaurish Technologies (GTPL) client’s websites, and it’s been more than a month; none of my websites got hacked.

Below are the stats of one of my websites for the last month.

Cloudflare is a service that adds an additional layer between your website and your server where you have hosted your website. No one will be able to get to know the IP of your website unless you keep it open in Cloudflare; yes, you can do that too!

If your IP has been proxied, then it looks like this.
Cloudflare offers basic features for free, and if you need to use their advance features, you will have to shell out a small amount for each website per month, but free features are sufficient, I feel.

Following free features of Cloudflare could be extremely useful for your websites.

1. Protect your server IP from exposure on the internet. Your proxy IP address looks like below to any attacker.
   

2. Provide free SSL.
3. Load your webpage quickly.
   • Minify JS and CSS
   • Creates Cache
4. Save server bandwidth as it keeps cache on the CDN network and responds to the requests without using your server till it is needed or cache for a few pages or the entire website is cleared

I would strongly recommend Cloudflare, especially for websites built in WordPress. I have started using Cloudflare two months back, and since then, none of my websites has been hacked.

Cloudflare automatically copies your existing DNS, but sometimes it fails to copy all of them; hence before switching name servers, please make sure you copy all DNS values in Cloudflare, including all records for your email

Common and useful use case:

For an Individual: Suppose you are an individual and use web services of an agency, you can add that agency as your member instead of sharing your password of Cloudflare or domain provider.

For a Company: You can manage multiple Cloudflare accounts under just one login. All you must do is, ask your client to add you as a member in their Cloudflare account or just update the name server once to your Cloudflare account, enabling you to maintain all domains from only one place.

I wanted to keep this article short hence would not get into more details, but if you have any questions, please post them in the comment section or drop me an email at [email protected] and I will be happy to answer them.