Hi, Habr! Today I will talk about the service CloudFlare . Lots of features, help with porting, and more.
I would like to start by saying that this service can be used for free. CloudFlare provides PRO features, but I personally don’t need these features. The cost of PRO is quite high - $ 20 per month.


What does CloudFlare offer us?

• Excellent transfer system - the service analyzes your current settings and copies them to you completely.
• Protecting the site and its caching at the DNS level.
• Its own statistics system.
• Many applications for integration.

Transfer system

I can confidently say that even a child can handle the transfer system. You simply specify the address of your site and press the big green button. Within a minute, your site is analyzed and then the page displays all previous DNS settings. It is also proposed to change / add some values ​​if something was suddenly transferred incorrectly. What is the plus? It's very simple, your site will be transferred and will not be idle. Your users will not even notice any changes.
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Site protection

In the settings there are two items: Basic Security Level and Advanced Security (available only for PRO). Basic Security searches 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 using URL analysis. If you are not sure about the security of your sites, then it may make sense to use this system (although of course it is better to review 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 the majority of 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 as different pictures. There is a possibility of automatic minimization - the system applies to JS, CSS and HTML files.

Statistics

Its statistics is quite a powerful tool. There is a certain limitation - in free accounts it is updated once every 24 hours, in PRO - once every 15 minutes. An analysis of both visitors and search bots. It also shows how many requests and how much traffic CloudFlare helped compress. Do not forget about the graphs, when you do not want to perform the analysis, you can just look at the beautiful graph and see the development of your site.

Application integration

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

Conclusion

CloudFlare is really a very convenient service. Agree to protect the site, forget about caching, set statistics and do not waste your nerves if the site is not available, 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 : In order to avoid stupid accusations that the post was paid for, 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, which passes traffic through itself.