Cloudflare: protecting a site from DDoS attacks and the losses they bring

To most business owners the phrase "DDoS attack" sounds like something entirely obscure and entirely unrelated to their business. That is not the case. According to recent studies, DDoS attacks cost companies 40 to 50 thousand dollars every hour. 

Cloudflare — a security solution for websites 

Cloudflare is a successful startup from the USA that offers a service for protecting websites and keeping them running steadily. It is becoming more and more popular both in the USA and in European countries. 

What else is this service good for? 

• It speeds up the loading of a site (by roughly 50%).

• It reduces traffic consumption (also by about half).

• It lowers the load on your hosting and speeds up page loading on your site. 

Thousands of companies use the service, among them such giants as:

• Cisco,

• Salesforce,

• Audacity and many others. 

The network of servers through which Cloudflare routes traffic is spread across 102 data centres. Their combined throughput is 10 Tbps (terabits per second).

What does Cloudflare charge to protect a site? 

You are bound to ask how much such a useful service costs. The good news is that there are several plans, including a free one. It is quite enough for most companies that have a single corporate site. There are of course paid packages too, with a variety of extra services and bonuses. But all of that will be of interest to large web studios and the like. 

The free package also includes a modern, highly effective firewall that analyses requests and reacts within seconds. The site is barely slowed down by it. 

Extra features of the service: 

• reliable encryption of the e-mail addresses shown on the site, while for the visitors themselves the addresses stay unchanged. Bots and spammers lose the ability to harvest addresses without permission. 

• certain parts of the content can be hidden from suspicious visitors. 

• if the server or hosting goes down, Cloudflare will serve static pages from its own cache. 

How do you connect Cloudflare? 

To connect your site to the service, you first have to register there with a login and a password. The next step is to add the site to your account. The service will give you name servers (NS) which you need to replace in the interface of your domain name registrar. The changes take effect within twenty-four hours. 

Another useful bonus: your site gets an SSL certificate and a secure connection completely free.

You can connect Cloudflare yourself or do it through the Host4Biz interface. Our support team will help any customer who has questions.