… and why you should use it.
Cloudflare provide a suite of cyber security services for websites and online systems. When you visit a site and you have to click a box to ‘prove your human’, that’s Cloudflare. Slightly annoying maybe, but for site managers it is very useful and we recommend their services to all our clients. Furthermore they have an incredibly generous free tier which is more than sufficient for most sites.
Some people have said to me in the past ‘No one wants to hack in to my site, so why would I need it?’. While you might not think you are a target for hackers, every website gets targeted at some point. It’s not hackers themselves, sat in dark rooms, wearing hoodies, meticulously visiting every site on the internet; the internet is flooded with automated bots that scan sites and either attempt to hack them automatically or alert individuals to weaknesses they discover.
Don’t believe me? You can hire a server, connect it to the internet, wait a little bit, then check the access logs. You won’t have to wait long, I’m talking minutes, sometimes seconds, and you will see an endless stream of bots trying to access your server.
Why? Some bots inject links to less savory sites, some hackers will encrypt your data and charge you a ransom to unlock it, others want to steal credentials. I am sure there are other reasons, and I am even more sure none are going to make your day any easier.
So what does Cloudflare actually do? Lots… too much to sum up here. One thing it does is analyse the traffic to your site, if it thinks it is malicious, it stops the connection right there. It’s not just check-boxes, there are many tools that Cloudflare gives you to analyse traffic and you can configure them in sophisticated ways to filter out malicious bots.
There’s an additional benefit, the more bad traffic you block with Cloudflare, the less bad traffic your website has to deal with. Which means you can see performance improvements in your website.
It’s not perfect, and it is not the only cyber security tool you should rely on, it should be one part of a comprehensive strategy to manage malicious traffic. It is also possible to block legitimate traffic, but with some fine tuning it can be extremely effective.
You can sign up for a free account here: https://www.cloudflare.com/
If your site is experiencing issues or you would like some help implementing Cloudflare for your site, get in touch, we would be happy to help.