This article is intended for customers who want to understand what Cloudflare is, how it works, and whether their website can benefit from it.
Cloudflare is a global security and performance service that sits between your visitors and your website. It works as a reverse proxy, meaning your website traffic passes through Cloudflare’s network before reaching your server. This brings several advantages:
What Cloudflare Does
Cloudflare helps your website in three key ways:
-
Speed:
Cloudflare caches static content (images, CSS, JS, fonts, etc.) on its worldwide network of data centres. Visitors are served content from the location closest to them, reducing load times significantly. -
Security:
Cloudflare blocks certain malicious traffic, bots, and attacks such as DDoS before they reach your server. This protects your website and reduces server resource usage. -
Reliability:
With features like Always Online and global load balancing, Cloudflare helps keep your website accessible even during outages or high traffic spikes.
How Cloudflare Works
- You sign up with Cloudflare and add your domain.
-
You update your domain’s nameservers to Cloudflare’s.
-
Your website traffic is routed through Cloudflare’s global network.
-
Cloudflare caches static files, filters threats, and optimises content delivery.
-
Safe and optimised requests reach your hosting server.
This setup is fully compatible with our hosting. You still manage your files, email, and hosting settings in cPanel as usual.
Who Should Use Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is beneficial for:
-
Blogs, business websites, e-commerce sites.
-
High-traffic websites needing better performance.
-
Websites targeted by bots, spam, or DDoS attacks.
-
International websites serving visitors from multiple countries.
-
WordPress, Magento, and most other CMS platforms.
In most cases, Cloudflare improves both security and speed with minimal setup.
When Cloudflare May Not Be Suitable
Cloudflare does not accelerate video or audio streamed directly from your hosting account. If your site hosts large media files (e.g., long MP4 videos) and streams them directly from your server, Cloudflare will not cache them and may even slow things down.
However, Cloudflare works perfectly with:
-
YouTube / Vimeo embeds
-
SoundCloud embeds
-
Any third-party streaming platform
Other cases where Cloudflare may not be ideal:
-
Services that require exposing the server’s true IP address (for example, some external integrations).
-
Dynamic content that cannot be cached may still rely heavily on your server's resources.
Do You Need a Paid Cloudflare Plan?
Cloudflare's Free plan is enough for most websites.
Paid plans add features such as advanced WAF rules, image optimisation, Argo Smart Routing, and improved caching controls. Businesses with higher traffic or enhanced security requirements may benefit from these upgrades.
How to Use Cloudflare With Your Hosting
Sign up at cloudflare.com, add your domain, and update your nameservers.
This gives you access to the full Cloudflare dashboard and all features.
Will My Emails Be Affected?
Email continues to work normally as long as your MX records remain unchanged in Cloudflare’s DNS settings. Cloudflare does not proxy email traffic, FTP traffic or traffic of other services, but only website traffic.
Summary
Cloudflare is a powerful and easy-to-use solution to:
-
Speed up your site
-
Reduce server load
-
Protect against attacks
-
Improve global performance
Most websites benefit from enabling it as long as they aren’t hosting large audio/video files directly.
Updated by SP on 08/12/2025
