Security for websites can be a major challenge for those of us who aren’t able to spend millions of dollars each month to protect our digital assets from hackers and other malicious site visitors. In fact, it’s actually a major challenge even for those businesses who do spend that sort of money to secure their websites, because there are a lot of very talented hackers out there.
Fortunately, there’s a fantastic new service out there called CloudFlare that helps the little guys. We love it so much, that not only are we getting all of our clients set up with it, but we’re also going to take a moment now to encourage everyone else to use it as well. Click on the image below to visit their site, or you can read the overview of what they do here first.
Basically, most security efforts focus around the idea of dealing with malicious visitors once they get to your site. Developers configure servers and the backend source code for web applications to deal with those visitors ways that hinder their ability to attack you. CloudFlare acts as a super filter that blocks out known malicious visitors before they ever get to your server! By using CloudFlare’s Name Servers (these are the things that point your domain name to the IP address that serves up your web content), you’re effectively able to prevent most malicious crawlers, bots, and known hackers from ever getting to your website. The best part about this service is that it’s FREE.
In addition to providing basic security enhancements to your website, CloudFlare also caches your static content and serves it from their own CDN (Content Delivery Network). This means that your website’s image files, CSS, Javascript, and any other files that would ordinarily clog up your server’s bandwidth, get served from CloudFlare’s servers instead. This gives your site a major performance boost, which is fantastic news for those of you who are using less performance-friendly economy-level website hosting services (though, you’ll still certainly benefit from investing in a quality website hosting service).
There are a variety of other features that CloudFlare offers, as well as several premium-only features that are available for a very reasonable service fee. In short, we highly recommend that if you’re interested in boosting your website’s performance and overall security, that you check this amazing service out for yourself.