What if I told you that there is a service that will magically make your sites faster, more reliable, encrypted. And all of this, especially the encryption, can increase the visibility of your sites in search engines. And what's most interesting is that all this kit can be for free, without any crocks, free periods and similar goodies. Just like that. Interested?
CDN or Content Delivery Network.
It is a distributed network, providing services to multiple users.
What is at stake here?
An analogy: we have one web server that hosts our site and the one that our user who uses our site wants to reach. On the other hand, there are a great many users spread all over the world. First of all, there are a lot of them, and secondly, they are in different places around the world. What makes them refer to one server is, for example: first, they will have a long time to wait for a response because they will be at the other end of the globe. Second, a lot of users will start using the site at once, which can also overload the server. The CDN works in such a way that: first, the user does not refer directly to the server, but to the CDN server, and it is mostly able to scasche, that is, remember the value of the page. If the user refers to the page, often the CDN itself serves most or all of the page to the user, and has a much faster response, because the server may be in the US and the user in Europe, or vice versa, anywhere in fact, then the user gets the response from the server closest to himself. That is, if a user in the U.S. refers to a page that is actually in Japan or Europe, then the server itself is only referred to by the CDN. Hardly, he has that page memorized. What does this mean for the user? That it will be faster, and the site will be much more interactive. In addition, it is much more secure. The CDN itself is able to handle much larger numbers of clients than a single server alone.
Why Cloudflare, for example?
This is one company that is doing quite well in this market. It could definitely be recommended although it is not the only one providing such services. On the other hand, the scale can be impressive, it has 250 ceters of data in more than a hundred countries, that is, our user, our site will get a scashed page in the nearest one to himself. No matter where our actual server with our site is, our user will get answers from the nearest data center.
Cloudflare prices
hey have several options in the price list. For zero zlotys we get a couple of things that will interest us the most, namely: we will be able to set up DNS. As if Cloudflare will take over for us, our servers, DNS functions and be the DNS server. Another thing that may interest us the most is protection against DDoS. DDoS is a form of attack, quite simple in form and often effective. That is, some cloud of Bots or computers or phones or cameras or other devices taken over by some organization tries to use some one particular site at a time, which in the vast majority of cases will cause the site to crash. Which will make the site inaccessible to our users, in the case of stores, nothing can be purchased. This is not a good thing, believe me. Such attacks are, firstly, not that rare, and secondly, quite cheap. At least from what can be inferred somewhere. As a result, if someone does not like a certain store, then in a relatively simple way, you can make it possible, at least for a while, to stop trading in that store. This is nothing recommended or good, but such things just happen, but by the fact of expanding its infrastructure, it stands between our users and our server. That is, if something happens, if our pat, our site will be attacked by such types of attack. Cloudflare is really effective to be s cheap firewall and defend us against such attacks. I will just point out that we have all this in the free version. In addition, we have Globally Load Balanced CDN, this is what I was talking about, that is, our user will get scashed data from the place that is closest to his location. Which makes it quite fast for him to start uploading our site and the feeling of interaction with our site will be very positive. There is also a free SSL certificate feature. This is achievable with Let's Encrypt, this can be achieved on your own, but it's also in the service and it's free. A lot of additional functionality, some application filters can be applied, all sorts of complicated rules, protection against bots, really such more advanced things, it's starting to get a little more complicated at the moment and also paid for. On the other hand, believe me, for this complete zero, functionality to protect us from DDoS and speed up customer interaction with our site is a really valuable thing and definitely worth implementing something like this. These are from the advantages. Informative: Cloudflare is a cool company insofar as it is used by the really big ones and there are quite a few of them, which brings us to the downside in a way, because like any solution it also has drawbacks. If Cloudflare goes down for any reason, it will cause their customers trouble as well. Fortunately, this is very sporadic and such a risk vs the benefits we get I think it's definitely worth it though. The second disadvantage: as if they are in communication with our client and our server, so really in the extreme case if they are successfully hacked, they are between us and our client and will be able to read the traffic between our clients and our site. Extremely unlikely, however, this risk exists. It is an additional element of risk in the whole puzzle.
How to configure?
This is already shown in our video vloog. ⬆️⬆️⬆️