Many web hosting providers offer Cloudflare as a part of the package due to the wide range of benefits offered by it. Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network or CDN with a server network that spans the globe. In today’s times, with search engines and social media platforms driving traffic to most websites, predicting incoming traffic is a near impossibility. Therefore, you need a tool that can help you manage website traffic efficiently. In this article, we will talk about how Cloudflare helps you manage your site’s traffic with ease while enhancing its performance.
When you activate Cloudflare, all incoming traffic to your website gets routed through it. Being a CDN, it stores copies of the static content of your website (think CSS, images, etc.). This helps it make the process of delivery of content highly efficient. After activation, whenever a visitor lands on your site, Cloudflare ensures that the server closest to the visitor steps in and reduces page load time.
How does Cloudflare help in managing your website traffic?
You can understand Cloudflare’s role in traffic management by looking at three aspects of what it does:
- It reduces the distance between the data and the site visitor
- It helps improve the performance of the server
- It helps in improving the load time of the website
A CDN is highly effective in managing website traffic. Since it stores the regularly requested static files in its cache, it can handle site requests faster. While this means that users experience a faster page load time, it also means that your website can handle more traffic since your resources are not occupied. It also reduces the burden on the server, leaving it free to work on other essential processes.
One of the biggest benefits of using Cloudflare over other CDNs is that it uses SSDs or Solid-State Drives. These are highly resilient and more reliable than the traditional Hard Disk Drives or HDDs. However, SSDs are costly. Therefore, most CDNs still use HDDs even though they have to compromise on the resilience and reliability of the network. But, Cloudflare uses SSDs making it one of the best CDNs available.
Here is an example to help you understand how a CDN helps manage traffic:
Your website is hosted on a server in Atlanta (US). Now, a user in Singapore is trying to access your website (thousands of miles away). If you don’t have Cloudflare, then the request travels from Singapore to Atlanta via dozens of connections, collects the data, and travels back through complex networks. At every stage, latency can step-in or a network-issue can render timeout the request. With Cloudflare, this process is simplified. When a user in Singapore tries to access your website, a server in Singapore fulfils the request. Your server is immediately released and can handle other requests coming from Asia or Australia or any other part of the globe with the same level of efficiency. This makes website traffic management a breeze.
Conclusion
As you can see above, Cloudflare can help you manage your website’s traffic in the most optimal manner. This can be a particularly helpful feature for a Hosting Reseller who can leverage ‘SSD-based CDN for optimal traffic management’ as a USP of the Reseller Hosting plans offered by him. We hope that this article helps you understand the way Cloudflare functions and how it helps manage your website traffic. Do share your views with us in the comments below.