Cloudflare Basic Guide
Panduan Dasar Cloudflare
This article is a complete basic guide about Cloudflare as the flagship CDN among web developers. You will get a clear understanding of what CDN itself is, what is Cloudflare and what are its features and advantages. Not only that, we will also provide the initial steps to create a Cloudflare account for your website.
What is Cloudflare?
CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network service (commonly referred to by the abbreviation CDN) and also a Web Security service. You can get this service from Cloudflare easily and the tariff is free. This cloudflare can actually be said to be a superior CDN when compared to the general CDN. This is because Cloudflare is able to provide maximum service. Cloudflare itself has a variety of packages namely Pro, Business, and Enterprise.
But, what exactly is the CDN itself? CDN is a system that will provide content quickly to end users and this is on various data centers on the internet. Content distributed via this CDN is usually in the form of static content. So, the way it works is by spreading static web content to several existing data centers.
When static content is loaded from the web (js, images, css, videos, and various other types of content) users will immediately receive content from the closest location to the CDN, not through the web server. In this case lies the superiority of Cloudflare, because your website as a user can load faster by end users wherever they are.
Indeed, CDN is not actually given away for free / free, but Cloudflare is willing to provide you with a free CDN with other additional features. This CDN is able to save Cloudflare bandwidth and spread it to all static content on the web, only afterwards to spread it back to the entire CloudFlare data center.
Cloudflare claims that there are more than 20 CloudFlare data centers scattered, especially in Southeast Asia, located in Singapore. CDN is very popular with developers because it can save bandwidth up to 50% in size. So, websites can be 2x faster. Although your website might already use the W3 Total Cache plugin, it still won't be faster than websites that use this Cloudflare CDN.
Featured in CloudFlare
Mirroring : The content that is on your site will become a mirror to each Cloudflare data center. This is why your website as a user can be optimized faster when visitors are far from the main server.
Caching : This means that Cloudflare runs the caching function at certain times and conditions. This one feature will save your hosting bandwidth, especially if your hosting has a limit on bandwidth. So, simply put your connection will go both ways, namely to the web visitor and to the server.
Firewall : This one feature can protect your website from security threats. In addition, you can block IPs from other countries, so you can determine which visitors can visit your website.
Analytics : This feature means monitoring of all activities that occur on your website. What are the activities that are monitored? For example the number of requests sent during the last 24 hours, the number of unique visitors, the origin of the visitor, and also the bandwidth that is available for 24 hours straight.
Railgun : This feature can also affect the speed of your website. Even Cloudflare with this feature claims that your website can increase its speed up to 300%. However, this feature can only be used by paid version users or if your hosting provider has a partnership with Cloudflare.
What are the benefits of Cloudflare?
- Cloudflare can hide the real IP address of your web hosting. What are the implications? Hackers become difficult and can not attack the server that is run.
- Cloudflare also creates a web cache so that resources to load the site can be faster and the server load is reduced.
- Cloudflare also provides optimal protection against all DDoS attacks by changing aspects of your web security.
- If your site is down again, CloudFlare claims to be committed to continuing to serve cached data until the site can be up again.
- If the registrar doesn't give you the choice to add DNS records, we can use nameservers from Cloudflare and add host DNS records there.
- CloudFlare also offers a free service if we want to add multiple domains at once.
- We can block site access from certain regions / countries. This setting can be desired by users if at any time they get a lot of attacks from certain countries.
Finally, Cloudflare wants to give SSL free to its users, which can also be used on shared hosts. Know the importance of the SSL Certificate .
How to Open an Account on Cloudflare and Add a Website
1. Open the Cloudflare website and click the "Under Attack?" Link in the upper right corner of the Cloudflare homepage as shown below!
2. Create a Cloudflare account by typing in your email address and password. Click "Create account now" to proceed to the next step. We recommend using an official email from your company. For example, webmanagement@gmail.com Why? Because billing email notifications and any info related to the service will be sent to this email address.
3. Enter the domain for your website then click "Add site". You don't need to add "www" to the domain. For example, if your website is www.name.com, just type nama.com.
4. Cloudflare will later scan DNS records from your domain. This will take about 60 seconds to complete. After the DNS scan is complete, click "Next".
5. Choose the package that suits your needs, then click "Confirm Plan".
6. A list of all the DNS records that have been found will be displayed, including your subdomain. In this step, you can decide which subdomains you want to activate with Cloudflare. If there are additional notes that you want to add to Cloudflare, you can add them here. After you have reviewed your DNS records, click "Next".
7. In the final step, you will be given a Cloudflare name server for your domain. Cloudflare nameservers are assigned to your domain and are listed on this page.
8. Click Continue. Now, you must now proceed to the Crypto tab of your new Cloudflare account to verify that Universal SSL Cloudflare records have been set for your domain. These should appear as two records in the Edge Certificates section: One for your root domain (example.com) and one for the wildcard subdomain (* .example.com) .
Note: Wait up to 72 hours to be able to spread server name information. Later, you will receive a confirmation email from Cloudflare when the name server update is complete. Your website will not experience downtime during this period.
Conclusion
Well, how, do you now understand the basics of Cloudflare? As a cheap and cheap vps hosting provider, especially Indonesian cloud hosting that has been internationally certified , we are committed to your success online. Also read other interesting articles from us on our blog and subscribe to get the latest updates from our blog or free ebook. Congratulations on developing your business, good luck!
