If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, their value proposition is simple: they’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats. CloudFlare makes it easy for any site to be as fast and secure as the Internet giants. That fits perfectly in line with what we’re always striving to deliver to our customers.
GreenGeeks excited to announce our partnership with CloudFlare, a web performance and security company.
Today, hundreds of thousands of websites—ranging from individual blogs to e-commerce sites to the websites of Fortune 500 companies to national governments—use CloudFlare to make their sites faster and more secure. We power more than 65 billion monthly page views—more than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined—and over 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through our network.
Experience Faster Web Performance
CloudFlare is designed to take our great web hosting by GreenGeeks and make it even better. They run 23 data centers strategically located around the world. When you activate CloudFlare, we automatically begin routing your traffic to one of their nearest data center’s.
As your traffic passes through the data centers, CloudFlare intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before we check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.
CloudFlare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the amount of computing resources your website requires, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, CloudFlare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their hosting account. The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.
Better Web Security
Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) we track on the Internet (see the chart below). As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites.
CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about their approach is that the system gets smarter as more sites are part of the CloudFlare community. They analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.
Activating CloudFlare
The strategic partnership with CloudFlare has allowed us to introduce a simple method of activating CloudFlare on your shared and reseller hosting packages. Simply follow these instructions:
- Click on the Cloudflare Icon in cPanel under the Software/services section.
- Enter your email address and accept the EULA.
- Select the domain you want to enable cloudflare for on the box on the left.
- The interface will pull up a list of sub-domains you can enable cloudflare protection on, click on the grey clouds for the sub-domains you want to enable and wait for them to turn orange.
For our VPS and Dedicated customers, you can contact support by opening a support ticket inside of your account manager to have the plugin enabled on your server.