Reaction to CloudFlare = Thoroughly Impressed

Posted by Alex on April 10, 2013

It’s not often that I am completely impressed by something, I tend to be a tough critic. Even if I don’t know much about something (a service, a product, etc), if I want to I can usually find a way to find something that should be better or done different. I’m just not impressed easily, what can I say?

Recently, at work a vendor of mine started talking to me about CloudFlare and how great it was. He actually didn’t know that I knew the company and had used it before, I was pretty so-so at the time. Anyways, following his lead a bit, I started checking them out more. I kept digging in a little deeper, and the deeper I dug the more I was impressed with their offering. The list of awesome things they provide for free is just impressive.

  • Fastest Free DNS, almost the Fastest Period – They offer the fastest Free DNS service there is, the setup process is a breeze with the automatic import, and the UI isn’t so bad either. 
  • Free CDN – Yes, their CDN is included in their Free plan. Not many vendors can say that – I dont know any.
  • Always Online – This is my favorite feature, if my server is down, CloudFlare will keep serving cached versions of my site. This is just freaking awesome and makes 100% website availability something that is possible.
  • Security and Contributing to a Safter Web – I’ve been following their blog and they are contributing in a huge way to stop mass Ddos attacks and making the web safer for everybody.

I dont think their Free features are going to stop either. I got on the phone to talk to one of their sales reps about their Enterprise plan for my company. They said that they actually try to offer new features on all account plans (including Free) if they can. They are even trying to figure out how to offer SSL certificates for free – holy cow.

Cloudflare is simply fantastic, from a personal user perspective but also a huge contributor to the online community as a whole making it a better place, you should use them too.

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