What Cloudflare is for and how it affects a VPS-UP website

Cloudflare is a powerful tool for website owners. It provides a wide range of services for Internet security. VPS-UP specialists have a detailed understanding of how Cloudflare works and how to connect it correctly.

Security with Cloudflare

When your website connects to Cloudflare, it receives reliable protection against DDoS attacks. This mechanism is based on the fact that all incoming traffic is routed through Cloudflare’s global network, which hides your server’s real IP address from potential attackers. Instead of directing attacks to your server, attackers direct them to Cloudflare. What’s more, Cloudflare has a worldwide network that filters and analyzes every incoming request, ensuring that your traffic is safe.

Website acceleration with Cloudflare

Cloudflare acts as a global content delivery network (CDN). It caches your site’s static files and code on its servers around the world. This means that users can download content from the Cloudflare node closest to them, rather than from a server. This approach significantly reduces page load times and offloads your server, making your site fast and productive for users around the world.

Connecting Cloudflare to your website

Connecting your site to Cloudflare is a process that will allow you to take full advantage of this powerful security and acceleration platform. Let’s take a step-by-step look at how to do it:

It all starts with signing up on the Cloudflare website. To do this, go to their website and click on the “Sign Up” button. This step will allow you to create an account and start the connection process.
After successful registration, go to the account management section and enter your website domain. Click “Add site” to add your site to the Cloudflare system.

When the site is added, the moment comes to choose a tariff plan. In most cases, the free plan “FREE” is perfect. However, depending on your needs, you can choose another plan that provides additional features.

After selecting a plan, wait for Cloudflare to automatically discover the DNS records for your domain. Make sure that the status is set to “Proxied” for each record so that all traffic is routed through the Cloudflare system for security and speed.

Next, follow Cloudflare’s instructions to configure the NS servers. Copy the suggested servers and configure them in your domain name registrar’s control panel. This step ensures that traffic is routed correctly through Cloudflare.

The last step is to make sure that your domain information points to NS servers containing “cloudflare.” This will confirm that your site is connected to Cloudflare and ready to use all its features for reliability and acceleration.

Now that you’ve completed these steps, your site is connected to Cloudflare and ready to use its powerful features. Cloudflare is a tool that helps website owners to ensure the performance of their web resources and a reliable and fast user experience anywhere in the world.

Cloudflare tools

Let’s take a closer look at each of the tools Cloudflare provides for managing your website.

Overview and analytics

Domain security settings. Cloudflare provides many options to customize your domain security, including settings to protect against DDoS attacks and insider threats.
Source code optimization. Minimize and optimize your website’s resources to make it load faster.
Fast cache reset. If necessary, you can reset the cache to immediately reflect changes on your site.
Activation of the “Under Attack” mode. When your site is under attack, you can activate this mode to enhance your defense.

Managing DNS records

DNS Protection. Ensure the reliability of your DNS records by preventing DNS attacks and tampering.
Add and verify DNS records. Add new DNS records and check their configured settings.

Work with email

Mail redirection. Manage mail redirection to send incoming messages to the right addresses.
Protect your email from spam and viruses

SSL/TLS

Obtaining SSL certificates. Cloudflare provides SSL certificates, including free certificates, to encrypt the connection between your visitors and your server.
Setting up HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). This is a mechanism that ensures that your website always loads using the secure HTTPS protocol.
Using HTTP/2. This protocol improves page loading speed by reducing delays.

Security

WAF (web application firewall). WAF prevents web attacks by analyzing web traffic and blocking malicious requests.
Page Shield. This tool allows you to customize additional security for specific pages of your website.
Protection against robots. Cloudflare offers mechanisms to detect and block unwanted robots, which helps prevent data scraping and other malicious activities.
DDoS protection. This tool provides powerful protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Caching

Cache duration. Configure how long data should be stored in the cache to speed up page loading.
Caching of static content. Static files such as images and CSS can be cached to reduce server load.
Multi-tiered caching. Cloudflare uses geographically distributed caching servers to maximize performance and reliability.

Programs

Live chat. The ability to implement live chat on your website to ensure communication with visitors.
Plugins. Cloudflare integrates with various CMSs and platforms, providing plugins and extensions to simplify customization and use.
Anti-ad blocking. It helps you manage advertising resources on your website.

Using these tools allows you to maximize the security, performance, and functionality of your website. Cloudflare is constantly updating and expanding its feature set, giving you access to the latest technology to enhance your online presence.

How to delete a website from Cloudflare

Turn on Development Mode:

Go to the Overview section.
Turn on Development Mode to temporarily disable caching, which is useful when updating your site. This allows updates to be seen immediately in users’ browsers, but does not remove the site from Cloudflare.

Pause Cloudflare on Site:

Go to the Overview section.
Select Pause Cloudflare on Site to temporarily disable the service. This stops traffic through the Cloudflare servers, making the real IP address visible and removing protection.

Complete removal of the site from Cloudflare (Remove Site from Cloudflare):

Go to the Overview section.
Click Remove Site from Cloudflare.
Select the appropriate option: temporarily disable, suspend, or completely remove the site from Cloudflare.

A complete deletion will remove all data from Cloudflare’s NS servers and cancel all subscriptions, but will require reconfiguring NS servers on the domain name registrar’s website.