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Millions of websites use Cloudflair, including MYHOST‘s website. On this page, we will share with you what Cloudflare is and the services offered by Cloudflare in detail. We will also walk you through the pricing mechanism in Cloudflare and its various plans and how to use Cloudflare for free for your website using the free Cloudflare plan, which comes with many powerful features to protect sites and improve their performance.

Have you ever heard the name Cloudflare?
In this lesson from the MYHOST of Hosting, we will introduce you to Cloudflare and its services and how to help you protect your site, increase its speed, and reduce your website hosting expenses easily.

Cloudflare is an American global Internet company that specializes in increasing the speed of websites, protecting and securing them through a huge network of servers spread over 250 cities in more than 100 countries on all continents of the world, making the Cloudflare network as close as possible to most of the Earth’s population.

Cloudflare currently has more than 7.5 million websites and employs around 2,000 employees, both numbers are increasing.

Due to Cloudflare’s huge network of servers and its presence in most countries of the world, about 95% of the world’s population can access the Cloudflare network in less than 50 milliseconds.

This huge network of data centers and the large number of network-connected websites enable it to stop about 70 billion attacks every day.

Among those attacks was a massive DDoS attack on Wikipedia and its sites on September 7, 2019, which brought Wikipedia sites to a standstill in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and then spread to the United States, Asia and the rest of the world.

After Wikimedia activated a security service in Cloudflare, Cloudflare repelled the attack and restored Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation sites in general.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation official, Cloudflir knew in advance of the attack and its intensity before he called them and informed them of its occurrence.

Cloudflare was able to counter this denial of service attack with the help of its massive 100 Tbps network.

The intensity of that attack reached almost 300 Gbps, a huge number that a small or medium company cannot even counter on its own without the help of a company with a huge network such as Cloudflare or Stack Path StackPath.com and the like.

This lesson is part of
Hosting Basics Series

  • What is web hosting?
  • What is a data center?
  • What is a domain?
  • What is DNS?
  • What is a server?
  • What is a bandwith?
  • Hosting resources explained
  • Compare types of hosting
  • What is shared hosting?
  • What is cloud hosting?
  • What is a VPS virtual server?
  • What is a ressler?
  • What is cPanel?
  • Is there unlimited hosting?
  • What is WordPress?
  • How to create a site

Cloudflare

  • About Cloudflare
    • What is Cloudflare?
  • Cloudflare Services
  • Cloud Flare Prices

About Cloudflare

The seed of Cloudflare was in 2004 when Cloudflare founder and current American billionaire Matthew Prince created a system aimed at protecting against spam or “soot” under the name Project Honey Pot.

Project Honey Pot
Project Honey Pot logo

The Honey Pot project protects against spam by collecting the IP addresses of devices and users who collect email addresses from sites and who 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 the field of web hosting is that the system does not depend on a computer or one web server only, but rather depends on more than one server who are connected to each other directly or via the Internet, which is the basis of the cloud hosting service Cloud Hosting, which is the web hosting platform used by major companies such as Google, Facebook and others.

As you can see, the system relies on a network of locations and servers shared in the service and the data you share, which enables the system to identify and block notorious users. This principle is very similar to the way Cloudflare works, which relies on data obtained from its huge network and from sites shared in 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 and the share price of Cloudflare has been rising since then due to the success and growth of Cloudflare that attracts the attention of investors.

كلاود فلير Cloudflare
Cloudflare logo

Cloudflare provides website protection, CDN, or what is also called the content distribution network, DNS and some other related services, which fall under the services of protecting websites, increasing their speed, improving their performance, and reducing expenses as well.

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

Cloudflare Services

Cloudflare offers a variety of services to businesses, website owners, and regular users as well. Among them are services to protect websites, increase their speed, improve their performance, and many other Cloudflare services, which rely mainly on the huge Cloudflare network, strong infrastructure, and advanced software and systems.

خريطة شبكة كلاود فلير Cloudflare
Cloudflare Network Map

Next, we will share with you the most prominent services and products offered by Cloudflare.

Cloudflare Web and App Protection Service

Cloudflare initially emerged as a provider of security and protection services for websites and applications and is still one of the most prominent and important companies in the field if not the most famous of them at all, as it is far ahead of its nearest competitor.

Cloudflare offers a variety of tools and services that help you secure your website and protect it from attacks easily. In addition, there are other services from Cloudflare that help you secure your web application and determine access to it according to special rules and settings that you can easily adjust according to what suits you.

Cloudflare Security

This is a list of the most prominent protection and insurance services offered by Cloudflare

  • Web Application Firewall (WAF)
  • Free SSL certificate and encryption of data transferred between the site and the browser.
  • Protect and limit API access.
  • Determine the rate of access to the site or application Rate limiting.
  • Counter DDoS Protection attacks.
  • Control botbots Management.
  • DNS security extensions or DNSSEC.
  • Hide the IP address of the website hosting server.

Cloudflare Sites and Apps Optimization Service

The other most prominent service among Cloudflare services is the performance optimization service 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 site in general.

These are the most prominent CloudFlare services to improve the performance of websites and applications

  • Cloudflare CDN content delivery or distribution network.
  • The DNS service is fast and secure.
  • Improve site speed via tools to increase the loading speed of site pages.
  • Cloudflare Stream video hosting and streaming service.
  • Load Balancing service.

Cloud Flair Insights Service

Since Cloudflare acts as a gateway between web hosting and its visitors, it has the ability to collect some statistics about your site and its visitors accurately and easily without the need to add any external code in your site 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, their geographical 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 on the Internet, whether using a content management system like WordPress or even using a Website Builder such as the hosted WordPress service WordPress.com WordPress.com and make it available to visitors and start offering your services through it, you will need hosting and a domain.

Cloudflare has expanded its services and now offers the service of selling domain names to users at prices that are considered the lowest in the hosting and domain market. Cloudflare currently does not place any profit margin on the basic domain registration and renewal prices and that may change in the future.

Cloudflare’s domain registration service enables you to control your Cloudflare account, DNS settings, protect your site, improve its performance, etc. From within one control panel easily, which is the central Cloudflare control panel, next to managing your website’s domain also from within the same control panel.

Hosting websites and files

Although Cloudflare is not considered one of the web hosting companies and does not provide web hosting or server hosting services at the moment, it does offer hosting services, files, code and applications related to the services it provides, especially services to improve the performance of websites.

And these Cloudflare hosting services are primarily geared towards developers and programmers. Examples of Cloudflare hosting services include:

  • Hosting images Cloudflare Images.
  • Hosting and streaming Cloudflare Stream video.
  • Front-end hosting that uses JAMstack The service is known as Cloudflare Pages.
  • A 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 the hosting MYHOST  ‘s team tried and reviewed because Cloudflare will not be suitable for hosting your website.

Cloud Flare Prices

Cloudflare uses two pricing systems or methods to sell its services, namely Plans and Cloudflare Add-ons. Where you can buy a specific package of Cloudflare packages for a monthly cost, or you can use the free Cloudflare package, even those used by many small sites and some medium sites because of the many advantages it contains that are sufficient for the needs of those sites.

Cloudflare plans and plans

The Cloudflare services it provides to applications and websites come in the form of 4 packages:

  • Cloudflare Free Package: It is a free package used by many small and medium sites, and it will be the package that you will often use because it comes with a lot of powerful features for free and you can get it from this link for free.
  • Cloudflare Pro Package: It is a paid plan from Cloudflare with some additional features and is dedicated to professional websites and currently costs $ 20 per month.
  • Business Package from Cloudflair: It is a plan dedicated to companies and small businesses and is priced at $ 200 per month.
  • Cloudflare Enterprise Package: This plan is for large organizations that need a customized package according to their needs and its price varies according to the agreement with Cloudflare and according to the services you will use.

Cloudflare uses per-site pricing and not for sites in the account. That is, if you have two sites and want to add the benefits of the paid Pro plan for both sites, you will need to subscribe to the Cloudflare Pro plan for each site separately and not for the entire account.

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

By contrast, this system has another advantage in terms of the freedom to choose a different package for each site and separate the financial costs of each of your sites. Not all sites need the same features and the same package, so it is better and more economical to put each site on its own separate package.

Cloud Flair Add-ons

The other system in pricing Cloudflare services is the system of paid add-ons that you can add to your site according to your needs and are either at a fixed monthly value or for the monthly consumption of each service or one of those add-ons.

Examples of such paid add-ons include:

  • Additional Page Rules You can get 5 additional rules for $5 per month.
  • Cloudflare Access for $3 per month.
  • Rate Limiting service for $0.05 per 10,000 visits.
  • Load Balancing service starts from $5 per month.

And other services and additions that you can add to your site easily from within the Cloudflare control panel.

So we’ve shared with 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 packages.

Do you have a question about Cloudflare or about web hosting?
I prefer your query in a comment below and the team of theMYHOST of Hosting will answer it as soon as possible, God willing!