Upgrade to CloudFlare Pro

Submitted by rasika on Mon, 05/06/2024 - 20:55

Facet strongly recommends use of Cloudflare service for your applications because of the range of services it offers. That being said, we recommend at a minimum Cloudflare Pro plan over the Free Plan for the range of services and protection it offers thereby making your application more secured and reliable. Let’s deep dive into to understand what is Cloudflare and what benefits we can avail on their Pro plan.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a service used to enhance the performance, security, and reliability of websites and applications. Below are some key points to consider using Cloudflare Pro

Cloudflare Services & benefits

CloudFlare offers wide range of services few of them are listed below.

  1. Analytics and Insights
  2. Content Delivery Network
  3. DNS Management
  4. Load Balancing
  5. Security Features
  6. SSL/TLS Encryption - This not only tightens the security but also improves the search engine rankings.

Let’s look into detail the Cloudflare configuration we strongly recommend to leverage to make the website more secured, performant and reliable.

  1. Security - Beyond hiding your origin’s IP address from potential attackers, Cloudflare also stops malicious traffic by leveraging below services.
    1. Page Rules - Page Rules allow you to customize Cloudflare’s functionality to match your domain's unique needs. It allows you to add 20 page rules, while the free plan supports only
    2. Bot Mitigation - Cloudflare reduces the risk of automated bot attacks and stops them from abusing your websites, mobile apps and visitors. Pro plan supports More Advanced Bot mitigation.
    3. DDoS Alerts - Cloudflare will send you a real-time alert when your systems automatically detect and mitigate a DDoS attack which is not available with Free plan.
    4. Page Shield - Page Shield protects your website visitors from client-side attacks that target vulnerable JavaScript dependencies.
    5. Captcha/JS Challenge - Captcha/JS Challenge will be served to the visitors based on the rules set that validates whether the visitor is using a legitimate browser.
  2. Performance - Cloudflare also serves as a Content Delivery Network (CDN), caching static resources and otherwise optimizing asset delivery.
    1. Lossless Image Optimization - It reduces the image size by 35% on an average thereby improving the site performance.
    2. Content Delivery Network - By distributing your content across numerous servers worldwide, it significantly reduces latency and accelerates the loading speed of your website or application.
    3. DNS Management - Cloudflare provides a fast and reliable Domain Name System (DNS) service reducing latency and improving the overall user experience.
  3. Reliability - Cloudflare’s globally distributed network routes visitor requests to the nearest Cloudflare data center. Combined with Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, Cloudflare network helps keep your application online.
    1. Load Balancing - Cloudflare's load balancing capabilities help distribute incoming traffic across multiple servers, ensuring optimal resource utilization and preventing server overload. This is particularly useful for maintaining high availability and reliability.
  4. Web Application Firewall features
    1. Cloudflare Managed Ruleset - These are a set of rules written by Cloudflare researchers and tested on vast amount of traffic to protect the websites against vulnerability exploits and common attacks such as cross-site forgery, cross-site-scripting (XSS), file inclusion, and SQL injection
    2. OWASP Core Ruleset - Provides protection against the top vulnerabilities identified by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).
    3. Exposed Credentials Check - Detects attacks with stolen credentials before end user accounts are taken over.
  5. Analytics and Insights - Cloudflare offers detailed analytics and insights into your web traffic, helping you understand your audience and identify potential issues such as attack vectors and traffic that does not make it to your analytics tracking of choice.

Peace of Mind

Facet recommends Cloudflare for our client’s ongoing benefit and peace of mind. While there are no ways to ensure doing everything to protect your business, this is certainly a low-cost, low-effort way of promoting a secure and performant website for your business.

Qualifying purchasers also benefit from Ticketed Support which is missing in the Free plan.

Apart from the benefits listed above, there are wide range of other benefits which can be found here.

Pricing

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/plans/

  • Facet recommends the $20/mo - $240/yr Annual Plan to get started with paid Cloudflare features.

Disadvantages of Cloudflare

  1. If the Cloudflare proxy server fails, your website may go down — however Cloudflare has a very large network and works to keep uptime paramount.

Recommendation: Buy Cloudflare Pro

As noted above, upgrading to Cloudflare Pro not only helps to further improve the website performance but also unlocks many new and advanced security features which makes your site more secure and reliable. It also offers prioritized support, and additional customization options, making it an ideal choice for businesses looking to elevate their website's performance, security, and overall user experience.