In today’s electronic world, every entrepreneur who thinks of how to start a business in Malaysia, has ambitions of reaching global markets.
The easiest way to promote an eCommerce business or eCommerce platforms is to sign up with a hosting provider that offers Content Delivery Network (CDN) services such as MaxCDN, Cloudflare CDN, and CacheFly.
What is CDN – Content Delivery Network
CDN is generally known as a content delivery network. Some people also refer to it as content distribution network. It is a geographically dispersed setup of proxy (middleman) servers located in different datacenters.
The objective of a CDN is to provide any content with 2 crucial features – high availability and speed.
The CDN’s network of servers stores content from an “origin” server and then renders a copy of it by serving the content from a server closest to the user’s geo location.
Related article: Is CDN Necessary for Website?
What is Cloudflare
Cloudflare, with distinctive performance optimization abilities has global resources and extensive range of services which makes it a comprehensive CDN provider.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) service designed to optimize the delivery of your website content. With CloudFlare, you can keep malware and hackers at bay, speed up your site by as much as 100x through multiple data centers globally, and reduce bandwidth costs.
Cloudflare also protects your website from DDoS attacks by acting as a firewall against these types of attacks. It helps boost your website’s performance, security and reliability.
Top 10 Advantages of Cloudflare Web Hosting
There are ten specific advantages of Cloudflare web hosting.
These along with the nominal Cloudflare pricing makes it a win-win situation for businesses who sign up for Cloudflare CDN.
Image Optimization
On an average, pictures and illustrations contribute up to 60% of a webpage’s total size. Cloudflare’s “Polish” has the ability to adjust these images to a smaller size.
There are two options to choose from – compress images lossless or lossy.
Lossless compression can reduce file size of an image by up to 21%. Lossy can decrease file sizes by ~ 48%.
Cloudflare CDN Polish achieves this compression by stripping as much metadata as possible from the images.
While using Polish to manage image sizes, its important to remember to purge cache to ensure the changes reflect immediately.
Page Rules
Using Page Rules augments a website’s security levels and also helps dictate the way Cloudflare CDN renders a specific URL, a sub-domain or an entire website. Cloudflare security also has the ability to let users configure a list of options like: –
- Customize web application firewall
- Disable apps, performance, and security, server-side excludes
- Set cache level
- Customize rocket loader
- Configure redirections
- Enable automatic HTTPS rewrite
- Specify cache levels
These options can contribute to protection against ddos attack when used in combination with other Cloudflare security features.
Minification
Cloudflare hosting enables reduction of load times and bandwidth usage of websites hosted through its CDN platform.
As part of minification – all non-essential characters and mark-ups are removed from the source code of the website. It is done in a way which does not impact the website’s functionality.
Cloudflare CDN minification markedly enhances website speed and accessibility. It results in a direct positive impact on website performance and user experience.
Browser Caching
With Cloudflare hosting, it is now easy to setup browser caching. Gone are the days of writing a “.htaccess” code or using an external plugin to control how a browser caches content and data.
Cloudflare CDN has a mechanism to initiate caching of static resources for a longer period of time within the visitor’s browser.
This helps repeat requests for specific static content to be served locally which speeds up delivery of web content dramatically.
Domain Name System (DNS) Security
Cloudflare security allows for enabling a very important web security feature – Domain Name System Security Extension (DNSSEC).
In today’s advanced electronic age, acts like forgery vulnerability is on the rise.
This is a type of a security loophole unauthorized commands are given from a trusted user within the web app which is then executed, leading to cyber security breaches.
DNSSEC can be very easily turned on within Cloudflare hosting. One just has to navigate to the “DNS” tab and then click on Enable DNSSEC.
Optimized Network Routing
A fast and secure website requires optimised network routing to deliver the content swiftly and safely.
Cloudflare CDN provides a specific service called “Argo” which intelligently routes site responses via an optimized network path.
For those who sign up with Exabytes, it is a double win. With one service, users can get Exabytes Support along with Cloudflare CDN service to boost website performance!
Cloud Based Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Cloudflare security brings along a web application firewall that protects sites from a range of vulnerabilities including the Open Web Application and Security Project (OWASP) top 10 vulnerabilities.
With a configuration of 145 security rules, the Cloudflare security WAF auto updates to protect against any new threats.
Contrary to popular notion, the Cloudflare WAF adds less than 1 millisecond of load time to websites protected by it.
Such an addition is completely negligible and worth every penny with the security and protection it gives.
Rate limiting
Restricting the number of times a user can request for content or make service requests to access a website is called Rate Limiting.
Cloudflare CDN packs a powerful punch with its Rate Limiting feature to protect and secure websites using Cloudflare web hosting.
Rate limiting offers protection against DDOS attack, brute force login attempts and other similar action.
To know what is DDOS and how DDoS protection secures your websites, please contact us.
Load Balancing
Load balancing is an essential component of providing a highly available website hosting service.
Cloudflare CDN has a cloud based load balancer which works internally and disperses a website’s traffic to different servers within a network.
This ensures a website will always be available irrespective of any unforeseen hardware issues.
Cloudflare hosting is an assurance of automatic failover, geographical routing augmented with manual and automated health checks performed several times a day.
A Cloudflare hosting plan purchased from Exabytes is a guarantee of top notch support round the clock.
AMP Real URL
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) intends to enrich speed of delivery and reliability of mobile content delivery.
This is an essential service for modern times given than half of the internet’s traffic originates from a mobile device.
The AMP Real URL by Cloudflare CDN employs signed HTTPs to verify content from the publisher when it is served from Google’s AMP cache.
Cloudflare security ensures that when it detects a supported browser, the AMP Real URL creates signed exchanges for the requested content.
The benefits of using AMP:
- Decreased wait times on mobile phones.
- AMP pages get higher priority in search results performed from mobile devices. Thus, it helps enhance mobile SEO.
For more and detailed information about Exabytes and Cloudflare hosting offered – please visit Exabytes Cloudflare page.
Sign up Cloudflare today and grow your business online.
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