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CloudFlare's technology is built like a CDN (content delivery network). It is a cloud-based, distributed network, which means it has multiple data centers spread across the web. When you add a domain to your CloudFlare account, CloudFlare acts as a proxy. This means that your visitor's requests to your website are routed through the CloudFlare network.
By passing your traffic through CloudFlare's network, CloudFlare can speed up the page load time for your visitors. CloudFlare decreases the time it takes for your pages to load through several methods, including efficiently routing packets via the most optimal paths, compressing the data packets and caching static resources (i.e. images, javascript, css, etc). Improving the page load times is beneficial to your site since it improves the experience for your visitors which often translates into longer and more frequent visits.
CloudFlare leverages data from Project Honey Pot and a variety of other third-party sources to identify online threats. There is a range of online threats including comment spam, email harvesting, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, denial of service attacks and so on. As web traffic passes through the CloudFlare system, CloudFlare can stop attacks before they reach your website.
In addition, CloudFlare uses the collective intelligence of the websites on its system to identify threats. For example, if an IP address is seen visiting one website in the CloudFlare community, another website a split second later and another site a split second later, there is a high probability it is a threat. CloudFlare can automatically protect its community of websites from these new threats as they emerge.
Since CloudFlare acts as a proxy, CloudFlare can offer a much more accurate visitor report. Current analytic systems like Google Analytics tell you a lot about human visitors to your site. However, these programs rely on JavaScript and are unable show you analysis on the search engine crawlers and threats visiting your site. For small sites, this often makes up a large portion of your traffic. A simple question CloudFlare can help answer is: which search engine crawlers are indexing my site, and which ones are not?