The service explained plainly.
THE BASIC IDEA
Cloudflare sits between your visitors and our servers. Requests reach Cloudflare first, and Cloudflare decides whether to serve a cached copy, pass the request to us, or block it.
WHAT IT PROVIDES
DNS hosting, which is fast and free Caching of static files at locations around the world Filtering of malicious traffic before it reaches us Protection against denial of service attacks SSL between visitor and Cloudflare
WHAT IT DOES NOT DO
Make a slow application fast. It caches static files well and dynamic pages only with specific configuration. Fix a badly built site Replace backups Replace security on your own site
THE TWO MODES
Proxied, where traffic flows through Cloudflare. That is where the benefits come from. DNS only, where Cloudflare answers the DNS query and traffic goes directly to us.
The distinction matters enormously and is the source of most Cloudflare problems.
WHO BENEFITS MOST
Sites with international visitors, sites receiving attack traffic, and sites where DNS management matters.
