Advantages of using Cloudflare

There are many advantages of using Cloudflare for your website. Some of them are mentioned below:

1. Cloudflare stops brute-force attacks and hacking attempts: Cloudflare filters out most of the spam attacks at the name server level, and such requests don't even hit your server. it protects your website from DDoS attack, SQL injection, common spam. This provides a secure environment for your website.
2. Cloudflare offers free CDN: Cloudflare has a Worldwide Content Delivery Network (Free CDN) that caches your static assets and serves them from nearest server to your users. This reduces the load on your server/website and improves the performance of your website.
3. Cloudflare provides free SSL: Cloudflare offers a free universal SSL certificate that encrypts the data between your user and your server /website. SSL also improves your SEO ranking as it is a Google search engine signal.
4. Cloudflare has a web application firewall: Cloudflare WAF has more than 145 rules to protect your website from common web application attacks like OWASP top 10, CMS vulnerabilities, etc. Cloudflare WAF is updated regularly and adds less than 1 ms latency to your website.

Setting up you Cloudflare account

To setup Cloudflare for your website, you need to follow the below mentioned steps:

1. Create a Cloudflare account and add your website: Go to the Cloudflare homepage and click on the sign up button to create your account. Enter your email and password and agree to the terms of service. Then, enter your website's root domain (example.com) and click on add site. Choose a plan level (Free plan is more than enough) and review your DNS records.
2. Update your domain name servers and choose a plan: On the next screen, Cloudflare will display a list of the DNS records associated with your domain name. you can add, edit or delete any records as needed. Then, click on continue. Cloudflare will provide you with two nameservers that you need to update at your domain registrar (where you purchased your domain name). This will point your domain to Cloudflare's network. Cloudflare will scan your old DNS records and import them.
   
3. Review your Cloudflare security settings: After you update your nameservers, Cloudflare will verify them and activate your site on their network. This may take some time. so be patient. Once you site is activated, you can review your security settings and enable features like SSL, firewall, caching, etc.
4. Install the Cloudflare plugin on your WordPress site (optional): If you are using WordPress, you can install Cloudflare plugin to integrate with your website. This will allow you to manage some Cloudflare settings from your WordPress dashboard, such as creating the cache, enabling development mode, etc.

In peramix, we integrated Cloudflare with our security solutions. We send blocked IPs and ASN numbers to be blocked by Cloudflare as our first line of defense, that helps us to reduce the load of our security solutions such as firewall. for example, if an IP get blocked by our firewall several times, it will be sent for block in Cloudflare, so that IP will not reach our network for certain amount of time.