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CloudFlare Wants to Make Your Site Faster and Safer

Frederic Lardinois

25 May 2011 — 1 min read

Eight months ago, CloudFlare launched its free content delivery network service, which I’ve been using on all of my sites since the day it became available. Today, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, the company announced its newest product: CloudFlare Apps. This new service allows CloudFlare users to install popular web apps like Apture, Typekit, Pingdom or web analytics software Clicky with just one click from their CloudFlare dashboard. The service will be available starting June 1.

CloudFlare Apps

CloudFlare’s basic service allows website owners to speed up their sites by routing all traffic through CloudFlare’s service. The company’s world-wide network of servers then delivers a cache of your code and images to the user without putting unnecessary stress on your server. Overall, the company announced today, its servers deliver over 3.5 billion pageviews per month now.

Speed and Security

CloudFlare says that most website owners are afraid to slow down their sites and open them up for security issues when they add additional code to their sites. With this new service, CloudFlare ensures that the code is constantly updated to avoid security issues and its content delivery network ensures that the additional loading time for a site’s users remains very low.

To get started with CloudFlare, you have to make some changes to your domain’s DNS settings, which can be rather scary for some users. Thankfully, the company provides very detailed step-by-step instructions that make the overall experience relatively painless.

As your traffic is already running through the company’s network, it can now also add additional functionality to your site. Until now, these extra features were mostly focused on security, but with CloudFlare Apps, you will also be able to add a wide variety of other features to your site without having to touch any code at all.

Among the launch partners are VigLink, Clicky, Apture, Smartling, Monitis, UserVoice, Pingdom, SnapEngage, ExceptionHub, Zoompf, Typekit, GlobalSign HackAlert, WatchMouse, TRUSTe, Haileo, Skimlinks, and StopTheHacker. CloudFlare will introduce one new app per day, starting June 1.

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