Cloudflare – Is it worth using and why?

Cloudflare is a free tool that increases the security of our website, increases its bandwidth, and in some cases speeds up our website. We decided to take a look at the benefits of using Cloudflare and whether this solution has any disadvantages.

What does ChatGPT think about Cloudflare?

To start with, as usual, we decided to ask what the recently popular ChatGPT tool thinks about Cloudflare. We’ll see if he’s right this time 🙂

Cloudflare is a CDN (Content Delivery Network) service that can help increase the speed and security of your website. Using Cloudflare can provide the following benefits:

• Speed ​​boost: Cloudflare distributes your website content on servers around the world, allowing your website to load faster for users in different locations.
• Attack Protection: Cloudflare offers various attack protection options such as DDoS protection, traffic filtering, and spam protection.
• Transfer savings: Cloudflare can compress your website content to save data transfer.
• SSL Support: Cloudflare offers a free SSL certificate, allowing you to connect to your website securely.
• Analytics: Cloudflare provides site traffic analytics to help you better understand how your site is being used

It’s worth testing the service and comparing the results with other solutions to see if Cloudflare is right for your website.

– ChatGPT

Whatever I say, ChatGPT is somewhat right this time, and what do I think about using Cloudflare? Let’s find out!

The fastest DNS in the world

How do DNS work? When someone types your domain into a browser, DNS redirects the traffic to the appropriate server. Cloudflare has them the fastest in the world. In addition, they have a convenient DNS panel that stands out significantly from various hosting companies, especially hosting companies whose name starts with “c”. Additionally, changes made to DNS take about 5 seconds.

Securityyoast

Cloudflare is, above all, about security. Several security features provided by Cloudflare.

Hiding your server’s IP address so no one tries to attack it directly, so you’re always protected by Cloudflare.

All traffic goes through Cloudflare, including unwanted traffic, thanks to which their systems properly deal with strange traffic from “China” or “Russia”.

Free SSL. With Cloudflare, you can use three types of SSL.
Flexible, i.e. if you do not have an SSL certificate, the traffic will be encrypted between the browser and Cloudflare (from which the files are sent), so your website will not be displayed as dangerous.

Full, your website has an SSL certificate but it has expired or is so-called “Self-Signed” so the traffic is encrypted anyway. This works if you do not renew the certificate, e.g. on Home.pl (yes, you do not have to pay your hosting company for your website to be SSL secured.

Full (strict), the website is fully encrypted using a Cloudflare certificate that you generate for 15 years. Unfortunately, it has to be uploaded to the server, which many hosting companies do not allow, in order to benefit from something that should be free.

WAF, i.e. Web Application Firewall. With proper configuration, you can make your WordPress login page secured so that you can only access the admin panel from your IP address. We can also configure our panel to receive an e-mail with the code before we can open its website thanks to Zero-Trust, it is a brilliant solution that we highly recommend.

Additionally, when it comes to security, Cloudflare includes many features that you do not need to configure, such as: Anti DDOS. However, if you get under someone’s skin, you can manually enable strict checking of each user before entering your website by clicking the “Under Attack” button.

Speed

Cloudflare gently speeds up your website by compressing all your data with the “Brotli” system. You don’t have to know what it is, but the files take up less. Another speed optimization feature is File Minification, which removes unnecessary comments and spaces from your code.

However, the most important function of Cloudflare is that the files are not sent from your server with processors from 2016 if you use a “d” hosting company, but are served directly from Cloudflare, which is one of the best in the world. All files except HTML files which can be bypassed. This simply makes your website work faster and is more efficient because the server is not burdened with sending large amounts of data, Cloudflare takes care of it.
I won’t describe the HTTP3 or 0-RTT functions because you can ask ChatGPT about them, but just turn them on, even though they slightly speed up your website.

Load Balancer. Do you have a store on Shoper? Did you know that you can use Cloudflare to increase the throughput of your store?
When paying for a Shoper store, you receive two IPP addresses. All you need to do is properly configure the Load Balancer to direct traffic to the less loaded one when the first one is barely slow. I refer to the guide here:
https://www.shoper.pl/help/artykul/konfiguracja-cloudflare-shoper/

Ps. I don’t know if Shoper actually gives you two separate servers and double the power or just two IP addresses connected to one server.

Analitykayoast

Cloudflare has analytics at the DNS level, so you can check realistically how many users visited your website without having to rely on Google Analitics, which (in most cases) will not register visits from users with AdBlock. Additionally, it has the function of adding tracking on the server side, which for Poles has the beautiful name “Zaraz”. But more on that in a moment. Configuring this tool is not the easiest, but if you want to have accurate analytics in your e-Commerce store, you should be interested in this topic.

Defects

Okay, but does Cloudflare have any disadvantages?
Yes, small.

The basic and most important disadvantage is that if you use the PayU payment intermediary, you must add their IP addresses to exceptions.

How to do it? We go to Cloudflare, then on the left click Security, then WAF, and then Create firewall rule. Then click Edit expression and paste this:

(ip.src eq 185.68.12.10) or (ip.src eq 185.68.12.11) or (ip.src eq 185.68.12.12) or (ip.src eq 185.68.12.26) or (ip.src eq 185.68.12.27) or (ip.src eq 185.68.12.28)

In Then… we select Bypass, and in Choose a feature we select Browser Integrity Check. Click Save and our PayU payments will work. (unless PayU changes IP addresses.)

Another small disadvantage of Cloudflare is the script execution time, which can take up to 100 seconds, and the number of uploaded files, which cannot exceed 100MB.

Summary

Should I use Cloudflare? If you don’t run scripts on your server that take more than 100 seconds to execute and you don’t upload files larger than 100MB, then yes. Otherwise, you can also use Cloudflare but you give up all the benefits it offers except the fastest DNS in the world.

BONUS

Do you have a WordPress website and you want your server to not be loaded at all and all static files to be sent from Cloudflare servers? Install this plugin and configure: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-cloudflare-page-cache/

Thanks to it, even if someone enters from Thailand, your website will work quickly, because each file will be served straight from Cloudflare servers located all over the world, including in Thailand!