Cloudflare

General usage

Users demand 24/7 access to online applications that load instantly. Failure to meet their expectations will lead to high bounce rates, cart abandonment, and lower conversion rates.

Cloudflare helps applications to scale globally with a basket of plug-and-play features that provide users around the world with fast, secure and reliable access to content:

• 180+ data centres in more than 100 countries put 99% of the developed world within 100 milliseconds of Cloudflare’s cloud network. 
• Static web content is cached and served from their data centres instead of the application’s servers.
• Dynamic content is compressed and routed on the fastest, least congested path to the end-user.
• Image files are optimised and resized for mobile devices.
• The Rocket Loader feature defers the loading of JavaScript files so that static content can be loaded first. 
• Load balancing decreases latency by routing requests to your nearest server.
• Cloudflare increases reliability by redirecting traffic around congested networks and away from failed servers.
• Security features include protection against DDoS attacks (i = Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks try to overload an application’ servers with massive  request volumes from multiple sources) and other malicious requests, firewalls, API shields, bot management, and SSL encryption.

Part of Cloudflare’s huge popularity is because of its quick implementation with no code changes required. Instead it uses an easy-to-use management dashboard for configurations.

Popularity

Cloudflare is by far the most popular Content Delivery Network according to Stackshare. More importantly, it has grown rapidly to be used by almost a third of the world’s top 100,000 sites:

Source: Builtwith

Marketplace benefits

Auto Trader, the largest car marketplace in the UK, were using a number of applications to manage their platform’s performance and security. This complex setup was expensive and required a lot of maintenance. 

Switching to Cloudflare increased their team’s productivity by allowing them to manage everything from one dashboard. Cloudflare’s built-in security features improved the detection and blocking of malicious activity, while performance features decreased latency by 50%.

Shopify powers more than one million businesses in over 175 countries worldwide. They wanted to help merchants increase their sales by providing customers with a faster shopping experience. The decision was made to migrate all their merchants to Cloudflare, which they managed to do without disruption. 

Shopify then used Cloudflare’s load balancing feature to better distribute traffic between its servers. The acid test was Black Friday 2019. The results were spectacular; Shopify merchants achieved record sales with a 60% increase over the previous year. Peak sales volumes averaged more than $1.5 million per minute.

CobbleWeb uses CloudFlare mostly to decrease application load speed  for international users. For instance, we implemented it for FanPass’s event ticketing marketplace because their buyers are situated all over the world.