Cloudflare, is an American web-infrastructure and website-security company, providing CDN services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security, and distributed DNS services.
Cloudflare’s services sit between a website’s visitor and the Cloudflare’s hosting provider. Cloudflare CDN and Cloudflare SSL are some of the best FREE services in the market. If you are still not using any CDN services on your websites, move to Cloudflare and get the benefits of fast speed and security of Cloudflare for Free.
How to set up Cloudflare CDN
- Go to Cloudflare.com
- Create an account in Cloudflare.
- Log in to the Cloudflare account.
- Click on the Add a Site button.
- Enter your site name.
- Select the Free plan.
- Cloudflare will show you existing DNS nameservers and A record.
- Click on the Continue button.
- Cloudflare will show you 2 nameservers.
- Go to your hosting account.
- Go to the DNS management section.
- Change the nameservers there. (Delete the existing nameservers).
- Click on the Update button.
- Come back to the Cloudflare account page.
- Click on the Done Setup button. (In most cases, it does not take 2-5 minutes to propagate nameserver but in some cases, it may take up to 24 hours).
- Wait for some time. Refresh the page. You can use the ‘Recheck now’ button.
- Once done, your website will be served over Cloudflare CDN.
How to set up Cloudflare SSL
- If Cloudflare is already setup for your website, then go to the SSL/TLS tab.
- Verify if your SSL/TLS encryption mode is set to ‘Full’. If not, you can set it to ‘Flexible’, ‘Full’ or ‘Full-Strict’ based on your requirement. You need to have an SSL certificate on your website. To get a free SSL certificate, follow our article How to get an SSL Certificate (HTTPS) for FREE (In 3 Easy Steps).
- Now go to ‘Edge Certificates‘ under the SSL/TLS tab. Turn on the ‘Always Use HTTPS’ option to always redirect your website to https.
- If your website is still opening in HTTP, enable the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) option. But make sure, you do have an SSL certificate. And, if it is a temporary SSL certificate, make sure that you renew the certificate before it expires.
- You can always buy a Cloudflare SSL.
Conclusion
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If you are still skeptical of changing your nameservers to Cloudflare, let me give you some confidence boost. Google itself recommends Cloudflare CDN as their preferred choice. Cloudflare has their hostings in all the countries in the world. You can check their hosting servers network from their official website.
To know more about website security, click here