CloudFlare Hosting

CloudFlare  is a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers that offers you a number of benefits including caching your content for faster page load speeds. CloudFlare increases the delivery speed of your site by storing copies of your site’s static content. In turn, your content is served through the server in CloudFlare’s network that is located closest to your website visitors. Additional advantages of using Cloud Flare are enhanced reliability because it directs your visitors to another server if one is experiencing an issue. CloudFlare also offers improved security by blocking security threats before they are even able to reach your site.

CloudFlare has grown to be a popular content delivery network thanks to a wide variety of features. These CDN features include:

• Global Web Caching – Improves the performance of your website performance for your visitors all over the world thanks to content caching in over 100 locations.
• Website Performance Optimizations – CloudFlare implements a number of website optimizations to help further improve the performance of your websites. These performance features include:
  • Auto Minify your JavaScript, CSS and HTML files
  • Set the Browser Cache Expiration length. The amount of time you choose will determine how long your visitor’s browser will load your site’s files from the local cache. This will ultimately speed up the performance of your site.Purge your site’s cache to force CloudFlare to grab the newest versions of your website’s files.
• Improved Security – CloudFlare helps to protect your website with a number of security measures including DDoS protection. Use the Security Level feature to force a captcha when suspicious users are trying to access your site.
• Analytics – You’ll get a number of statistics including being able to see how much bandwidth CloudFlare has saved you, the number of unique visitors and the number of security threats that have been blocked.
• Improved website reliability by serving your visitors static pages if your site runs into any issues

At A2 Hosting, you’ll be hosted on our high performance SwiftServer platform. Looking for an even bigger speed boost? A2 Hosting has got you covered. For up to 20X faster page loads than competing CloudFlare hosting provider, choose our Turbo Servers.

With an interest in CloudFlare Hosting, it’s clear that you care about performance and support. But it’s likely you want to be sure you can depend on your host. Depend on A2 Hosting and our fine-tuned, ultra-reliable servers backed by our 99.9% Uptime Commitment.

If you are looking for additional features that can give your site a speed boost; A2 Hosting accounts comes loaded with them! Learn more about these speed enhancing features like  QUIC,  LiteSpeed and  Memcache.

CloudFlare began as a solution called Project Honey Pot, created by Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway. It was a result of giving websites the ability to track how spammers were able to harvest email addresses.

While thousands of websites participated in Project Honey Pot, what was missing was how to actually prevent this malicious behavior, not just keep track of it. In 2009, Matthew was getting his MBA at Harvard Business School when he met Michelle Zatlyn. They decide to work together to see if they could in fact prevent that malicious behavior. Since they were pretty much creating a “firewall in the cloud”, they decided to call the project CloudFlare. Prince, Lee and Zatlyn began to build a CloudFlare team with the main goal being to help build an improved internet.

The main issue that the new CloudFlare team was running into was that while CloudFlare would help make websites safer, the solution would cause latency and ultimately slow down site performance. However, through a beta test, CloudFlare learned that with the combination of caching static resources and blocking junk/malicious traffic, websites began to perform up to 30% faster compared to sites who were not using CloudFlare.