Hello guys in this article let’s take a look at all the advantages and disadvantages of using cloudflare.
This is the most comprehensive article you can find online on the topic so I would recommend you to bookmark and share the article so without further ado let’s get started.
Is cloudflare worth it?
Yes, it is definitely worth it because it not only helps you increase the website loading speed and uptime but it also help you improve your website security and safety by helping you add a free SSL certificate to your website and it also provides web application firewall protection and DDOS protection, it also blocks all the suspicious traffic that is visiting your website by blocking their IP address and save the bandwidth of your server, and most importantly it is one of the most popular websites for content delivery network because more than 13 million websites use the platform including websites like New York Times and cnn.com, and most importantly it is free to use, you can sign up to cloudflare and register your website in less than 5 minutes.
Now let us take a look at all the advantages and disadvantages of cloudflare.
13 Pros and cons of cloudflare
Pros of cloudflare
- very popular cdn for free
It is one of the most popular content delivery network and websites in the world as a matter of fact it has more than 5 million customers who are using its website and services worldwide and some of the most popular websites that use cloudflare includes, canva, digital ocean, Forbes, Vimeo fox news indeed discord CNN fiverr New York Times grammarly and many more.
So, since these are some of the most popular and largest websites on the internet , cloud flare is undoubtedly one of the most popular cdns and websites that you can trust on and yeah it is free to use even though there are premium plans available you can get started with a free plan and set up your website.
- easy to setup and use
Another advantage of using it is that it is very easy to use and very easy to set up.
In order to set up cloudflare on your website you already need to change the domain name servers of your domain from your registrar to cloudflare nameservers after you register your website into cloudflare.
It has a very beginner friendly dashboard where all the important columns like analytics DNS email security speed cache and all the other features are present in the left column so you can easily access them.
- protects your website
Another advantage of using cloudflare is it can definitely protect your website from getting hacked, viruses and malware.
By installing cloudflare on your website, the IP address of your website will be hidden and the cloudflare IP address will be shown in public which will protect your website in various ways. You can also set up certain page rules in cloudflare.
It can also stop the brute force attack on your website which is a major cyber attacks on your website.
Other than that, it also offers a free SSL certificate which is very important nowadays for secure data transfer, it also blocks all the bot traffic and suspicious traffic to your website, it has a web application firewall which will protect your website from DDOS attack, cross site scripting, SQL injection, cookie poisoning and many more attacks.
It will also try to block certain IP addresses that are trying to attack your website online, if not, it will show you some puzzle, captcha to solve before you access the website to test if the user visiting the website is really human being or not.
You can monitor all that security issues and bot traffic in the cloudflare dashboard itself.
And even your DNS are also protected in cloudflare so if you want to make your website secure and safe for users to access then you should be using cloudflare.
- Faster speed and higher uptimes
Another advantage of using cloudflare is that it provides faster loading speed and higher up time of your website it is really cool.
Like, for example it obviously provides the cash in of your website so the copy of your website will be stored on the browser of the user so if the user again try to visit the website then that copy of the website will be displayed on the screen and apart from that cloudflare also offers features like unification of HTML CSS and JavaScript which will also increase the loading speed of the website and it also offers features like image optimisation where your existing images on your website will be converted into webp format, your images will be compressed, lazy loaded which will improve the loading speed of the website.
And since your website is hosted on multiple servers across the world, it will also handle large spikes of traffic because multiple copies of your website will be stored in different servers of the world which is a good thing.
So, by installing your website in cloud flare, you can get faster loading speed and higher up time of your website and you can also improve your loading speed of your website by following extra recommendations you get in the speed column of the dashboard.
- Good support
Another advantage is that you also get good customer support especially if you are a premium customer like live chat and email support and you can also get support from the community of the cloudflare where you can discuss all of your issues and problems with other developers in the community.
Apart from community you also get support from by sending a mail to the team, you can also refer lots of support articles and documentation to solve your problems as a free user.
- You will get faster DNS changes
Another advantage is that by using your website in cloudflare, whenever you make changes in your DNS, for example if you change your web hosting company from one host to another then you obviously need to change the name servers in your domain registrar but since you have pointed your domain name servers to cloudflare during the registration of cloudflare, simply change the IP address of your name servers in cloudflare DNS to your new host and Dns propagation which would take anyway between 24 to 50 hours of time in normal cases would take not more than one hour in cloudflare which is really great so if you are trying to transfer your website from one host to another host then you should be using cloudflare due to faster DNS propagation.
- Save server bandwidth
After installing cloudflare on your website, everytime some visitor visit your website then there will be some cached versions of your website in different parts of the world and the copy of your website will be shown to the visitor from the nearest server so it will save you a lot of bandwidth instead of giving the request of website to the original server so by installing cloudflare you also save a lot of bandwidth of your original server because your website copy will be stored in different servers in various parts of the world and it also increases the loading speed of the website.
- It is also a domain registrar
Apart from being a content delivery network it is also a domain registrar like godaddy where you can purchase domains of your choice of different extensions securely and you can also transfer your existing domains to your cloudflare and manage all your domain portfolios at one place so if you want to purchase new domains then you can also consider this website.
- There are amazing cloudflare apps
There are some amazing cloudflare apps that you can add to your website like social icons, back to top button, Chatra, codeguard you can think of this cloudflare apps as wordpress plugins for your website which will improve your user experience on the website or increase the loading speed or do some other function and you can purchase or just install after preview of these apps on your website easily without editing a single line of code.
These are all the advantages of using cloudflare.
Cons of cloudflare
- Live chat support is in premium
Even though it has a good customer support in terms of community and documentation but if you want a live chat support where you can talk to the specialist and solve your problem then you obviously need to switch to a premium plan which will cost you some money and live chat support is not available in the free plan.
- Limited features in free plan
Limited features in the free plan like you cannot set more than three page rules and you cannot also do certain security measures on your website like enable HTTP2, image resizing, load balancing, smart routing, automatic platform optimisation, and many more features are limited in free plan and you only have to upgrade to the premium plan to access those features.
- If cloudflare is down, your website will be down
Another disadvantage is that cloudflare is like a middle man between your website and user, and if the cloudflare is down then automatically your website will be down and becomes inaccessible for users but this happens with the rare because it is a very huge website and largest websites on the Internet like new york times and Forbes use cloudflare so cloudflare going down is very less likely to happen.
- Genuine users are blocked sometimes
Another disadvantage is that as i mentioned earlier, cloudflare acts as middle man between your website and user and it validates whether the traffic visiting your website is genuine or bot traffic or suspicious traffic and sometimes it can block the IP address of your genuine users who are trying to visit the website or it will present some captcha and Puzzle to solve before the user visits the website so sometimes this can lead to bad ux who are trying to visit your website or the page and user can just bounce back from your website.
These are all the advantages and disadvantages of cloudflare.
Conclusion
These are all the things you need to know about cloudflare.
Do let me know what are your thoughts about cloudflare in the comment section below.
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