Having a Website for your business, commerce, app, etc.. is almost a must these days. Either way being only informative or your main income, you need it to be up and properly working for the audience. That’s why showing your content fast, secure and efficiently is a top priority for the website and the reason of why a content optimizer, like CloudFlare, became so important to it.
CloudFlare is designed to speed up and secure any website by duplicating it on another server location and redirecting your traffic to it. The system works somewhat like a content delivery network (CDN), but it is intended to be much easier to setup and configure.
To explain how the system works, imagine you having a website (e.g., clickittech.com), running a server with the following IP address (e.g., 1.1.1.1).
Before CloudFlare, if someone typed your site’s domain (clickittech.com) into their browser, or clicked on a link that pointed to your website, the first thing that visitor’s computer would do is a query on the DNS system to get back your web server’s IP address (1.1.1.1).
In order to work, CloudFlare assigns a nameserver to your domain instead of adding another resource to your hosting or program. You have a name like clickit.ns.cloudflare.com with another IP (e.g., 9.9.9.9) with no other change to your domain. Then when a visitor wants to access your website, CloudFlare redirect the traffic to their nearest datacenter changing the DNS from (1.1.1.1) to (9.9.9.9).
CloudFlare shows your site after checking that it is a real visitor. The content is delivered even faster because it caches parts of websites that are static like images, CSS, and Javascript. Then it brings all the dynamic content which is constantly refreshed like blog posts or articles. As for the static, this is regularly refreshed as low as a daily basis or changed to be more time, so it delivers the latest updates you have on your site.
If the request is a type of resource it doesn’t cache, or if it doesn’t have a current copy cache, then it makes a request from the data center (9.9.9.9) back to your origin server (1.1.1.1).
The combination of these systems means that it can protect sites from malicious visitors by stopping them before they even get to the origin web server. Save over 60% of the bandwidth that a site would otherwise have to pay for; save over 65% of the requests that would otherwise have to be handled by a site; and cut in half average page load times. In order to make performance even better, plus the website secure, it also does some web content optimization. If you are interested in How to set up CloudFlare with WordPress on AWS visit the link to read more. Here in ClickIT we can help you to speed up your website with Cloudflare. Contact us!
