Intro

At time of writing my organization is bringing up the idea of using cloudflare as our CDN. I have no idea what this - below are my findings.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a free CDN. CDN stands for content delivery network. The idea behind a CDN is that the content is not stored in a single web host / server. With the CDN you're able to distribute that information across hundreds of data centers across the globe thus providing intelligent routing of content is delivered to site visitor.

Because of the distribution this will give a faster experience to the end users.

Pings

As site users ping our server, if we only have one this will create high ping rates. A ping (Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper) is a basic Internet program that allows a user to test and verify if a particular destination IP address exists and can accept requests in computer network administration.

Pings serve two purposes: * verifying that the target host is available
* determining round-trip time (RTT) or latency

Plug-in's

You can attach several plug-ins to Cloudflare, some include caching & image optimization. This of course increases the cost of Cloudflare.

Security Measures

With hosts using CDN's, they create robust databases that can protect a site from malicious actors.

Setting up Cloudflare

• Cloudflare.com, sign up as normal with email and password
• Add your site
• Cloudflare will pull all DNS records that it found
• Log into your DNS and change the name servers
• Allow for Propagation