Recently I migrated this blog from GoDaddy to a Virtual Machine on Microsoft Azure. Migration is not an easy process. What I feared the most during the migration is the downtime. I had kept the original domain name with me. But since, I was migrating from one host to another host with entirely different platform (From Apache on shared web hosting to NGINX on a virtual private server), I was hoping that the users would notice at least few hours of downtime since it takes some time for DNS to propagate.
But, I was completely wrong. Since I was using Cloudflare, the downtime was reduced to a single minute. Since I was so impressed with Cloudflare, I thought that it would be a good idea to write an article on why you should also use Cloudflare with your website.
1. Migration made easy
Like I said before, it took only a minute for the site to get back up and running on a completely different host. Cloudflare has got 63 data centers (as of writing) and is constantly adding more data centers to that list. During my first setup with GoDaddy, I had configured the Name Servers of the domain (omgdebugging.com) to point towards the Name Servers of Cloudflare. So, all I did was simply going to the Cloudflare dashboard and edit the existing DNS record to point to the newly provisioned Virtual Private Server. No more waiting for DNS to propagate. Furthermore, you can enable/disable Cloudflare with a single button click.
Cloudflare provides advanced blocking of threats and superior DDOS protection. Cloudflare allows to enable advanced DDOS mitigation at the single click of a button on the dashboard. There is the story of the largest DDOS attack which almost broke the internet in which Cloudflare mitigated the attack and the site owner did not even notice that the site was under attack. It also blocks malicious users from trying to hack your website. Cloudflare also provides vivid analytics in the form of graphs, pie charts and tables which help you in understanding the kind of traffic you are getting from around the world.
One more advantage of using Cloudflare is that it caches the websites and serves the cached content to the visitors so that the host machine has to do less work. It also automatically minifies the HTML, JS and CSS so that the user experience is improved. One more advantage is that the outbound data transfer is reduced (which is chargeable in Azure after a certain limit) due to caching which helps me in keeping the costs down. The biggest benefit is that even if your website goes down in case of some unforeseen circumstances or you are simply performing an upgrade, Cloudflare would automatically serve the pages from its cache so your visitors do not experience any kind of downtime.
4. SSL Certificate
Yep. Cloudflare provides SSL certificates to the websites it supercharges. So, without any setup, I can have the visitors visit this blog on a secure connection. Try accessing this blog using https://omgdebugging.com . It works! (Some images might be broken. I will fix them once the weekend comes). Best thing about this is that you do not have to buy and setup a SSL certificate from the known vendors which again costs around $100. One thing to remember is that the SSL connection provided is between the user and Cloudflare. The SSL connection is not established between Cloudflare and the Host by default (You need to set it up manually). In case you would like to set up the SSL certificate, I would suggest following Troy Hunt’s blog post over here – http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/04/how-to-get-your-ssl-for-free-on-shared.html
All of the above features mentioned are free in the FREE Tier of Cloudflare. Yep. This is the best part. Even the SSL Certificate is provided for free. There are paid tiers as well but my needs are fulfilled by the Free Tier. You can add unlimited number of websites to the Free Tier. There are paid plans as well which you can check over here – https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/
In case you would like to set up Cloudflare for your website, feel free to follow the instructions at this link – https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/201720164-Step-2-Create-a-CloudFlare-account-and-add-a-website
If you have any doubts or queries, feel free to post in the comments. Have a nice day!