What is Cloudflare and how to use it for freeا⭐️

Have you heard the name Cloudflare before?
In this lesson of what is the best hosting, we will introduce you to Cloudflare, its services, and how it helps you protect your site, increase its speed, and easily reduce your website hosting expenses.

Cloudflare is a global American internet company that specializes in speeding, protecting, and securing websites through a massive network of servers spread across 250 cities in more than 100 countries on every continent of the world, making Cloudflare's network as close as possible to most of the world's population.

Cloudflare currently has more than 7.5 million websites and about 2,000 employees, and both numbers continue to grow.

About Cloudflare

The seed of Cloudflare was planted in 2004 when Cloudflare founder and now US billionaire Matthew Prince created a system aimed at protecting against spam or SPAM under the name Project Honey Pot.

Honey Pot protects against spam by collecting the IP addresses of devices and users who collect email addresses from sites that send spam.

The project is the first Distributed Spam Protection System to be built on the Internet.

The meaning of a distributed system in the field of software and website hosting is that the system does not depend on only one computer or web server, but depends on more than one server that are connected to each other directly or via the Internet, which is the basis of the Cloud Hosting service, which is the website hosting platform used by major companies such as Google, Facebook, and others.

As you can see, the system relies on a network of shared sites and servers and the data they share, which enables the system to recognize and block disreputable users. This principle is very similar to the way Cloudflare works, which relies on the data it gets from its huge network and from the sites that subscribe to the various Cloudflare services.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is an American internet company founded in 2009 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange on September 13, 2019 under the symbol NYSE:NET. Cloudflare's stock price has been on the rise since then due to Cloudflare's success and growth attracting the attention of investors.

CloudFlare offers website protection, CDN (Content Delivery Network), DNS (Domain Name System), and other related services to protect websites, increase their speed, optimize their performance, and reduce their costs.

Cloudflare has also launched initiatives and services within its scope, such as the 1.1.1.1 service, which is one of the most popular and fastest DNS systems that enable users to browse the Internet at higher speeds and with greater privacy. Cloudflare also offers Domain Names registration service at very low prices in addition to some other services.

CloudFlare Services

Cloudflare offers a variety of services for businesses, website owners, and everyday users. Among them are services to protect, speed up, and optimize websites and many other Cloudflare services that rely heavily on Cloudflare's massive network, powerful infrastructure, and advanced software and systems.

Here's a look at some of the products and services CloudFlare offers.

CloudFlare's Web and Application Protection Service

Cloudflare started out as a website and application security provider and remains one of the most prominent, if not the most popular, company in the industry, far ahead of its closest competitors.

CloudFlare offers a variety of tools and services that help you secure your website and protect it from attacks with ease. In addition, there are other services from CloudFlare that help you secure your web application and limit access to it according to special rules and settings that you can easily adjust according to your convenience.

Here's a list of Cloudflare's top security services

• Web Application Firewall (WAF)
• Free SSL certificate and encryption of data transmitted between the site and the browser.
• Protect and limit API access.
• Rate limiting.
• DDoS Protection.
• Bot Management.
• DNS Security Extensions or DNSSEC.
• Hide the IP address of the website's hosting server.

Cloudflare's website and app performance optimization service

The other most prominent service among Cloudflare's services is Performance Optimization for Websites and Applications, which includes a set of sub-services and tools dedicated to increasing the speed of websites and applications, improving the user experience, and improving the performance of the application or website in general.

These are CloudFlare's top services for optimizing the performance of websites and applications

• Cloudflare CDN.
• Fast and secure DNS service.
• Optimize site speed with tools to increase the speed at which pages load.
• Cloudflare Stream video hosting and streaming service.
• Load Balancing.

CloudFlare Statistics Service

Since Cloudflare acts as a gateway between website hosting and its visitors, it has the ability to compile some statistics about your website and its visitors accurately and easily without the need to add any external codes in your website pages, as is the case with almost all web statistics services such as Google Analytics and others.

Cloudflare gives you access to these statistics, including the number of visitors, visits, geographic locations, visitor history, etc., browser data, etc. The statistics you have access to vary depending on the plan you subscribe to.

Cloudflare Registrar Domain Name Registration Service

In order to create a website, whether using a content management system like WordPress or even a website builder like the WordPress hosted service WordPress.com, and make it available to visitors and start offering your services, you will need hosting and a domain.

CloudFlare has expanded its services and now offers the sale of Domain Names to users at some of the lowest prices in the hosting and domain market. CloudFlare does not currently have a profit margin on its basic domain registration and renewal prices, but this may change in the future.

Cloudflare's domain registration service enables you to control your Cloudflare account, DNS settings, protect and optimize your site, etc. from the convenience of one single control panel, the Cloudflare Central Control Panel, and manage your website's domain from the same control panel.

Website and file hosting

Although CloudFlare is not a web hosting company and does not offer web hosting or server hosting services at the moment, it does offer file, code, and application hosting services related to the services it offers, especially website optimization services.

These Cloudflare hosting services are primarily geared towards developers and programmers. Some of the most notable examples of Cloudflare hosting services include:

• Cloudflare Images.
• Cloudflare Stream video hosting and streaming.
• Front-end hosting that uses JAMstack and is known as Cloudflare Pages.
• Serverless computing service called Cloudflare Workers.

Therefore, if you are looking for hosting for your website, we recommend that you use one of the good web hosts that have been tested and reviewed by the Best Hosting team because Cloudflare will not be suitable for hosting your website.

Cloudflare Prices

Cloudflare uses two systems or pricing methods to sell its services, namely Plans and Cloudflare Add-ons. You can purchase a specific Cloudflare plan for a monthly cost, or you can use the free Cloudflare plan, which is used by many small and some medium-sized websites because it includes many features that are sufficient for the needs of those websites.

Cloudflare Plans and Packages

CloudFlare's services for applications and websites come in four packages:

• CloudFlare Free Plan: It is a free plan used by many small and medium-sized websites and it will be the plan that you will most likely use because it comes with a lot of powerful features for free and you can get it from this link for free.
• Cloudflare Pro Professional Package: This is a paid plan from Cloudflare that has some extra features and is intended for professional websites and currently costs 20$ per month.
• Cloudflare Business Package: This is a corporate and small business plan priced at 200$ per month.
• Cloudflare Enterprise: This package is for large organizations that need a customized package according to their needs and the price varies according to the agreement with CloudFlare and the services you will use.

CloudFlare uses a per-site pricing system and not the sites in the account. This means that if you have two websites and want to add the benefits of the paid Pro plan for both, you will need to subscribe to the CloudFlare Pro plan for each website separately and not for the entire account.

One disadvantage of this system is that users who have more than one website will need to pay more to Cloudflare for each site they have that uses a paid plan.

On the other hand, this system has another advantage in terms of the freedom to choose a different package for each site and separate the financial costs for each of your sites. Not all sites need the same features and the same package, so it's better and more economical to put each site on a separate package.

Cloudflare Add-ons

Cloudflare's other pricing system is a system of paid add-ons that you can add to your site according to your needs, either at a fixed monthly rate or against the monthly consumption of each service or add-on.

Examples of paid add-ons include the following:

• Additional Page Rules and you can get 5 additional rules for 5$ per month.
• Cloudflare Access for 3$ per month.
• Rate Limiting service for 0.05$ per 10k visits.
• Load Balancing service starting from 5$ per month.

And many other services and plugins that you can easily add to your site from within the Cloudflare dashboard.

We've told you what Cloudflare is, the history of the company, the different services it offers, how those services will benefit you, and the prices of Cloudflare's packages.

Do you have a question about CloudFlare or website hosting?
Leave your query in a comment below and the Best Hosting team will answer it as soon as possible!