ShoppingCartElite.com is a full business suite for running an online business. We provide our customers with organic traffic through SEO and provide a full solution for their eCommerce needs.
Business challenge We offer a full solution eCommerce service to hundreds of websites. As we have grown, so have our web performance and security needs. In addition, we were in search of a solution to support dedicated SSL. The only SSL we offered was shared, which was not a long-term solution for our customers.
We found Cloudflare in early 2011 and began looking at the service as a possible answer to the web performance, security and SSL needs we were facing. We were intrigued with the service, but were not sure how it would work across hundreds of domains.
During our research, we suffered a major DoS attack that affected our entire clientele. We figured it would be a good opportunity to test the service and so, we put all of our client’s websites on Cloudflare’s network.
Cloudflare's impact
Once our sites were on Cloudflare, we saw the effects immediately. Cloudflare blocked every attack that came in and offloaded the traffic from the attack to keep all our customer sites up and running.
Good traffic (green) and attacks (red) during a traffic spike to a ShoppingCartElite customer site.
The before and after with Cloudflare was just amazing. Cloudflare offloaded server resources by about 30%, saving us a considerable amount of time and money. With the Cloudflare CDN, every image was automatically cached and served, making our sites almost 40% faster across the board. Each byte load was cut by half a second which was impressive.
Not only did Cloudflare help with performance and security, they also allow us to give each customer stand alone SSL. With Cloudflare SSL we don’t need to install SSL certificates on our servers because it works at the DNS level. You don’t have to install SSL—you simply turn it on and it works.
Cloudflare definitely delivers on performance and security. Our business is not IT security, so it’s nice to have Cloudflare doing what they do best behind the scenes allowing us to sleep at night.
You would typically have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for the service Cloudflare offers. If you’re in eCommerce, performance is very critical and imperative for your customers. Cloudflare can definitely help you more than you can ever imagine.
Offloaded server resources by 30%
Increase load speed by 40%
“Cloudflare can definitely help you more than you can ever imagine.”