I recently put Cloudflare over the top of this website to protect it and improve performance, on the free plan (I have no affiliation with Cloudflare). The entire process to onboard was an incredibly easy and out of the box you get an insane list of features:
- DNS
- DDoS Protection
- CDN
- SSL
- WAF
- Basic bot mitigation
The fact that Cloudflare makes such capabilities available to the internet for free is incredible and simply – it’s something every web property should do by default. It also means should you need to upgrade features for some reason it’s all there and ready to switch on. Well done to Cloudflare on making such a seamless process to enable the product.
While we are talking about amazing Cloudflare free offerings you should also check out 1.1.1.1. It’s a free DNS service that will give you:
- Improved Browsing Speed
- Enhanced Privacy
- Increased Security
How it works is that you change either your computer or your router (I changed my home router) to use this DNS service, then it will automatically look up Cloudflare for DNS queries. This will bypass your ISP. It also supports all the cool stuff if your router does such as DoT (DNS over TLS), and DNS over HTTP (DoH). ISP DNS’s are notorious for being unreliable, slow, logging user queries and monetising this and sometimes for government interference. This reduces your risk of these types of issues.
A short disclaimer – nothing is of course free, and Cloudflare is still using both of the above services to make money. For their CDN service, they likely monetize it by making it frictionless to move into their paid plans (freemium business model), and to steal marker share from Akamai which focuses on the Enterprise end of the market. For the 1.1.1.1 service it would lead to brand awareness, aggregate data would be sold (I believe) and it’s a freemium model that can be upgraded to a paid service. If you use either service, you protect yourself but you need to trust Cloudflare as a company. For me the tradeoff was worth it.
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