Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks. Today, businesses, non-profits, bloggers, and anyone with an Internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare.
More than 25 million Internet properties are on Cloudflare, and our network is growing by tens of thousands each day. Cloudflare powers Internet requests for ~15% of the Fortune 1,000 for more than 1 billion unique IP addresses per day.
Here’s how it works:
In the early days of the Internet, when you wanted to load a website, your request would go from your computer to a server, which would then return the web page you requested.
If too many requests came in at once, that server could be overwhelmed and crash, becoming unresponsive to anyone trying to access the resources it hosted.
This made it difficult for owners of Internet properties to provide content that was fast, safe, and reliable. Cloudflare was created to ease these difficulties and empower users with the resources to make their sites, apps, and blogs safe and performant. This is done through the use of a powerful edge network that provides content and other services as close to you as possible, so you get the information as fast as possible.
You see, Einstein figured out some time ago that the speed of light is a hard upper limit on how fast you can communicate; there comes a point when the only thing you can do is move the content and computation closer! That’s why we put data centers in more than 200 cities all across the world: to give you what you’re looking for quickly!
Cloudflare also provides security by protecting Internet properties from malicious activity like DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and other nefarious intrusions.
And allows website owners to easily insert applications into their websites without needing to be a developer.
If you’re a developer, you can run Javascript code on our powerful edge network, so that you can get as close to a user as possible. This eliminates delays, and improves the experience for users like you!
Your Internet provider, and anyone else listening in on the Internet, can see every site you visit and every app you use — even if their content is encrypted. Cloudflare offers a free DNS service called 1.1.1.1 that you can use on any device. Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 protects your data from being analysed or used for targeting you with ads.
Including some other helpful tips if you’re signing up. The short answer is that Cloudflare is safe. Cloudflare is essentially nothing more than a content delivery network (CDN). The theory behind it is that they will cache copies of your website to their servers, which are spread across different locations.
CloudFlare was the fastest DNS for 72% of all the locations . It had an amazing low average of 4.98 ms across the globe. Google and Quad9 were close for second and third respectively. Quad9 was faster than Google in North America and Europe, but under performed in Asia / South America.
So, Cloudflare is not a host. Cloudflare’s basic service is a DNS provider, where you simply point to your existing host. Additionally you can, if you want, tunnel your requests through their proxy servers and gain the security and performance features they offer in this context.
