So what is Cloudflare?

So what is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks. Today, businesses, non-profits, bloggers, and anyone with an Internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare.

Millions of Internet properties are on Cloudflare, and our network is growing by tens of thousands each day. Cloudflare powers Internet requests for millions of websites and serves 60 million HTTP requests per second on average.

Here’s how it works:

In the early days of the Internet, when you wanted to load a website, your request would go from your computer to a server, which would then return the web page you requested.

If too many requests came in at once, that server could be overwhelmed and crash, becoming unresponsive to anyone trying to access the resources it hosted.

This made it difficult for owners of Internet properties to provide content that was fast, safe, and reliable. Cloudflare was created to ease these difficulties and empower users with the resources to make their sites, apps, and blogs safe and performant. This is done through the use of a powerful edge network that provides content and other services as close to you as possible, so you get the information as fast as possible.

You see, Einstein figured out some time ago that the speed of light is a hard upper limit on how fast you can communicate; there comes a point when the only thing you can do is move the content and computation closer! That’s why we put data centers in more than 330 cities all across the world: to give you what you’re looking for quickly!

Cloudflare also provides security by protecting Internet properties from malicious activity like DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and other nefarious intrusions.

And allows website owners to easily insert applications into their websites without needing to be a developer.

If you’re a developer, we allow you to run Javascript code on our powerful edge network, so that you can get as close to a user as possible. This eliminates delays, and improves the experience for users like you!

We provide security and performance for millions of Internet properties and offer great functionality such as SSL and content distribution to every website on our network.

Our services run silently in the background, keeping many of the websites and services you depend on up and running.

Your Internet provider, and anyone else listening in on the Internet, can see every site you visit and every app you use — even if their content is encrypted. Cloudflare offers a free DNS service called 1.1.1.1 that you can use on any device. Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 protects your data from being analysed or used for targeting you with ads.

Above all, we are mission-driven. That’s why we protect organizations working on behalf of the arts, human rights, civil society, or democracy with Project Galileo, giving them Cloudflare’s highest level of protection for free.

The right to vote is vital to democracy, which is why we also protect official election websites from hacking and fraud through Project Athenian, also at no cost.

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