Hi, Habr! Today I will talk about the CloudFlare service . A bunch of features, help with migration, and much more.
I would like to start with the fact that this service can be used for free. CloudFlare provides PRO features, but I personally do not need these features. The cost of PRO is pretty high - $ 20 per month.


What does CloudFlare offer us?

• Excellent transfer system - the service analyzes your current settings and completely copies them to yourself.
• Site protection and caching at the DNS level.
• Own statistics system.
• Many applications for integration.

Transfer system

I can say with confidence that even a child can handle the transfer system. You simply enter the address of your site and click the big green button. Within a minute, your site is analyzed and then all previous DNS settings are displayed on the page. It is also proposed to change / add some values ​​if something suddenly transferred incorrectly. What is the plus? Everything is very simple, your site will be transferred and will not be idle. Your users will not even notice any changes.

Site Protection

There are two items in the settings: Basic Security Level and Advanced Security (available only for PRO). Basic Security is looking for the most threatening (?) Visitors. What algorithms and methods - I could not understand, but none of the users complained that they were considered "threatening." With Advanced Security, everything is clearer - it protects against possible SQL-Injection and XSS attacks by analyzing URLs. If you are not sure about the safety of your sites, then it may make sense to use this system (although of course it is better to revise the script code). By the way, the system can add a variable to determine the location: HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY. You can call it from Perl:

$ country_code = $ ENV {"HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY"};

or from PHP:

$ country_code = $ _SERVER ["HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY"];

Site caching

The caching system allows you to automatically cache most of the static resources, such as css-files, js-scripts and pictures. There are two types of caching - Basic and Agressive, the second considers example.com/pic.jpg and example.com/pic.jpg?foo=bar different pictures. There is a possibility of automatic minimization - the system extends to JS, CSS and HTML files.

Statistics

Own statistics is a rather powerful tool. There is some restriction - in free accounts it is updated once every 24 hours, in PRO - once every 15 minutes. Both visitors and search bots are being analyzed. It also displays how many requests and how much traffic CloudFlare helped compress. Do not forget about the graphs, when you do not want to perform an analysis, you can just look at the beautiful graph and see the development of your site.

Application integration

Among the integration applications, there are many third-party statistics services available - for example, Clicky, which analyzes a huge number of parameters, including visit time, clicks from search engines, and much more. Site monitoring systems such as Monitis and Pingdom are available. SMS, Twitter, or Email notifications Mail is now configured within 5 minutes. In my opinion, the most useful thing among these applications is the CodeGuard service. It completely “backups” your site and if it is not available, then it shows a saved copy of it. You can use this service for free if your site takes up less than 1 GB. By the way, it was CloudFlare that hosted the site of the notorious LulzSec, and it was CodeGuard that showed the pages when the LulzSec server crashed.

Conclusion

CloudFlare is really a very convenient service. Agree, protect the site, forget about caching, set statistics and not waste your nerves if the site is unavailable, just transferring the site to other DNS is great. And if almost all of these features can be used for free, then such a service is just a fairy tale :)

PS : To avoid stupid accusations that the post was paid, I immediately say that I have nothing to do with CloudFlare and CloudFlare, Inc. (US).

UPD: The title was really incorrect, this is not a DNS hosting, but a CDN proxy that passes traffic through itself.