Why we use Cloudflare for the websites we host

Where possible we use Cloudflare for websites we host. This adds an extra level of security and speed benefits to websites that we host here at SeasonsBounty.

We first started to use Cloudflare back in 2018 by using the ServerShield by Cloudflare extension that was available on Plesk. Since then, we have now help customers create and use their own Cloudflare accounts instead to continue receiving the security protections and speed boosts that Cloudflare provides to websites.

Cloudflare caches pages and assets, so it can serve content to visitors from a server that are nearest to them. International visitors tend to benefits this the most as our web servers tend to be based in the UK while Cloudflare has more than 300 locations across the globe.

As pages and assets are being cached on Cloudflare, this reduces load on our web servers, freeing up resources for non-cached requests allowing them to processed and load faster. Then having to deal with both cached and non-cached requests on our servers.

Cloudflare also preforms optimizations, like CSS and JS minifying, reducing the files size that needs to be downloaded making the website download faster and load quicker.

While it was only a small increase, we found that Cloudflare DNS response times tend to be quicker than DNS provided by some hosting companies by a few milliseconds. While very minor, it all adds up when trying when trying to get a web page to load as fast as possible.

All this helps as a faster website helps with user interaction and with SEO.

As Cloudflare operates a reverse proxy at the DNS level, the servers IP address is masked by using one of Cloudflares IP addresses. Making it a bit more difficult for an attacker to find and attack our own server directly.

They also offer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection and a Web Application Firewall (WAF) even on the free tier.

With the WAF we tend to set up custom rules when needed. For example:

• A rule to protect the login for WordPress websites. This is the most common one we set up. It will display a managed challenge to confirm that it is a human trying to access it. This has greatly reduced the amount of brute force attacks that we see on websites.
• A rule to show a managed challenge suspect high levels of traffic from certain countries. For example, if the website is targeting the UK but seeing high levels from China or Russia. The manage challenge makes sure that it is an actual person vising the website from those locations.

With theses it helps us better protect our customer websites and our own services.

Cloudflare gives us access to analytics for up to the past 30 days so we can see how many unique visitors the website has had and how much was cached and how much band with it has saved with the web server.

This can also be useful in working out how actual numbers visiting the website as it keeps track of all who is visiting the website, including bots, as it’s just a hit counter. Since GDPR and cookie laws don’t allow us to track users using other tools like Google Analytics unless they accept the cookie notice on websites. So, you can use this to give a rough estimate on who is allowing allow the cookie notice or not.

Cloudflare offers a better user experience than we can offer by our domain provider. Using the default DNS provided by our register limits to only us a reseller to make changes. While Cloudflare allows us and the customer to have access to it.

With Cloudflare it makes it easier to give other users access. It allows customers, or even us if we are administrators, to invite users to manage the Cloudflare account with different levels of permissions. This is handy if a customer has a different supplier for another service or have their own networking team that requires DNS access. It also allows users set up 2 step verification for that added security.

It also helps with transfer services to us and away from us. As customers don’t have to worry about changing domain name services during the transfer process.

We use cloudflare as it gives speedboosts, security, analytics and better admin controls for our customers.

Most customers can make use of a free Cloudflare account so theres no extra charges for them for using it. However customers can upgrade to a paid Cloudflare account if they wish to do so if they require the extra features they need or if they are operating a business-critical website or online service.