Cloudflare: Specialist for decentralized networks
Cloudflare is a decentralized Content Delivery Network (CDN). Under the leadership of CEO Matthew Prince, the company operates 102 data centers in 49 countries worldwide. At the end of 2010, the company's official launch was announced at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference. In the first year alone, 150 million user interactions were counted with approximately 5 billion page views per month.
The company Cloudflare
Cloudflare is the operator of a network that works with both regionally distributed servers and servers connected via the Internet. This form of service is called either Contend Delivery or Content Distribution Network (CDN). It is mainly about delivering content to users at a higher speed. Especially when it comes to building a website this technology should provide sustainable improvements. The reduction of bandwidth load is also a major focus in this context.
If, for example, a website is specially designed for visitors from the Asian region and the server is located in Germany, the use of a CDN can actually provide a significantly better access speed and thus attract considerably more visitors. Due to the proven principle in practice, more and more companies are deciding to include various services from Cloudflare as simple integration in their portfolio of services.
Put simply, Cloudflare basically creates copies of a specific Internet page on its own servers. These in turn are distributed all over the world. So when potential visitors want to access a page on the Internet, the system ensures in favour of a well defined load distribution that all those servers are addressed which can deliver the requested website to the user the fastest. The servers of Cloudflare can best be compared with the page cache of a browser.
Cloudflare is still considered a start-up company. The capital received so far from investments amounts to currently more than 182 million US dollars. In addition to the rapid spread of Internet sites, the company also offers its customers comprehensive DDoS protection and numerous other services in the field of IT and information security. These include a so-called web firewall. At the same time, the Cloudflare employees regularly worked on improving existing products. For example, the Cloudflare algorithm has become increasingly powerful over the past few years. The company received particularly great attention when Wikileaks used the CDN to protect its own Internet presence in 2013.
In the course of the last few years, Cloudflare has developed extremely positively in direct comparison to the overall market. At the same time, the company delivered more and more content to a steadily growing number of customers. In the current year, a survey showed that almost 7.7 percent of all websites published worldwide use CDN for their purposes. Around 5.5 percent of these belong to Cloudflare. With this figure, the company based in San Francisco, USA, has a market share of 71.8 percent. Far behind is the second placed company Akamai, which has a market share of only 12.7 percent.
Especially the DDoS protection of Cloudflare is a certain kind of "life insurance" for many companies, such as operators of an online shop. Should a DDoS attack take place, there is a great danger that the online shop is no longer accessible and no more money can be earned. As more and more retailers are increasingly selling their goods exclusively over the Internet, experts continue to expect growth in cloudflare. By the spreading of HTTPS-encrypted sides the necessity grew that these are also cached to the servers of Cloudflare.
Some technical details about Cloudflare
A major advantage of the CDN is the fact that Internet pages containing static content, such as images and javascripts, load much faster because they no longer have to be obtained from the actual server as in the past. With Cloudflare there is the possibility that all contents of a page are received from a server that is located closest to the page in terms of location. Especially if the server is located far away, this difference will be felt very quickly.
Contrary to the general assertion, cloudflare is much more powerful and by no means a pure CDN. Besides the mentioned DDoS protection, the company offers its users a so-called always-online function. With this small feature, comparatively small websites, which are usually stored on a single server, are comprehensively protected against attacks. The pages still remain online when they would actually have been offline long ago.
In addition, Cloudflare offers the possibility to establish special SSL connections. Every established connection runs via a name server of Cloudflare, so there is always a secure transmission path. The encrypted transmission of data, the US company offers for some time completely free of charge. Here, the connection between the servers of Cloudflare to the website servers can also be encrypted. At this point, Cloudflare also accepts non-certified connections. A missing Certificate does not make the connection establishment via SSL any less secure. A web browser for against this background actually issues a warning message.
Activate Cloudflare for your own web presence
Optimizing security and performance is a top priority for most website operators. Basically, Cloudflare is a so-called reverse proxy. As soon as the website uses cloudflare, all data traffic is routed through the provider's network. From this moment on, Cloudflare takes over the basic protection against DDoS attacks, the minimization of CSS, Javascript and HTML code and the caching of static content on the website.
For activation, potential customers must set up a Cloudflare account on the provider's homepage. Afterwards the customer can enter his domain name and then send all entries of the DNS zone for the domain in question to the support of Cloudflare. The provision of the services by Cloudflare can take up to 48 hours. If the Cloudflare staff detects any discrepancies, they will usually contact the customer in person or by e-mail and/or telephone.
Conclusion on Cloudflare
Cloudflare generally enjoys a very good reputation. The boom to virtualization, an increased feeling for data security as well as the optimization of the accessibility let the services of Cloudflare appear extremely attractive. Interested parties should first register for free and thoroughly research the range of services offered. Those who would like to experience a little more services can switch to a fee-based tariff that offers additional functions and features that are aimed at a specific target group. With web hosting providers like the webhoster.com AG or Agency Ehrenwert UG Cloudflare can be used free of charge in all tariffs.
