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What is CloudFlare?

This article discusses CloudFlare's content delivery network (CDN), and how it can help improve your web site's performance and security.

What is CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a distributed network of servers that provides several advantages for a web site:

  • Cached content: By caching web site content, CloudFlare helps improve page load speeds, reduce bandwidth usage, and reduce CPU usage on the server.
  • High availability: With a redundant network of servers worldwide, if a server experiences an issue, CloudFlare's CDN simply “fails over” to use another server.
  • Increased security: CloudFlare helps improve security by blocking threats before they even reach a site. CloudFlare's CDN can also provide some protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

All managed hosting customers at A2 Hosting automatically get access to a free CloudFlare account.

Some features and services, such as SSL, require an upgrade to our CloudFlare Basic, Plus, or Firewall plans. Each upgraded CloudFlare plan is domain specific; additional CloudFlare subscriptions are required for each additional domain.  For more information about these plans, please see https://www.a2hosting.com/cloudflare-plan-comparison.

How CloudFlare works

When you activate CloudFlare on your account, your site becomes part of the CloudFlare network. This network routes web site traffic through CloudFlare's global network of data centers. (To view a map of CloudFlare's current data center locations, please visit https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map.)

CloudFlare optimizes web content delivery by storing duplicates of static content (such as CSS, JavaScript and image files) on its servers. Your web site content is served from the CloudFlare server located nearest to your visitors, which decreases page load times. If a server in CloudFlare's network is very busy, web traffic is automatically routed to the next server nearest to your visitors.

CloudFlare's CDN also blocks threats and limits abusive bots before they reach your server. This helps increase security and reduce wasted bandwidth.

CloudFlare works for both static and dynamic web sites. However, CloudFlare is not suitable for web sites that stream video or audio directly from their origin server. Embedded videos, such as those from YouTube or Vimeo, however, are compatible with CloudFlare.

How do I start using CloudFlare?

You can activate CloudFlare for your site through cPanel. If your account does not include cPanel, you can register directly on CloudFlare's web site. For more information about how to set up CloudFlare for your account, please see this article.

More Information

For more information about CloudFlare, please visit https://www.cloudflare.com.


  • Activating CloudFlare

    Learn how to activate CloudFlare for your web site with just a few easy steps.

  • Configuring CloudFlare

    After you activate CloudFlare, you can configure it for your web site using cPanel. Learn how here.

  • Using SSL with CloudFlare

    Learn about the different options for using SSL on a CloudFlare-enabled account.

  • What is Railgun?

    Railgun greatly speeds up delivery of non-cached web pages, and complements CloudFlare’s caching service. Read this article to learn more.