What Is Cloudflare?
A Global Network Sitting in Front of Websites
What is Cloudflare? It is a company that runs a global network of servers. Those servers can sit between website visitors and the website's own server, which makes Cloudflare a reverse proxy network. When a site uses Cloudflare, visitors connect to Cloudflare first, and its servers forward requests to the site's origin when they are needed. Other providers offer similar services, so Cloudflare is best understood as one example of this model.
Cloudflare bundles several services in one place. These include a content delivery network (CDN), DNS hosting, caching and security features that filter malicious traffic. A pure CDN focuses on delivering content quickly. Cloudflare also answers DNS queries and inspects requests before they reach the server.
What Changes When a Site Uses It
- Visitors reach the network first. The domain's DNS points to Cloudflare, and proxied traffic flows through its servers.
- Static files are cached at the edge. By default, common static file types such as images, CSS and JavaScript are cached. HTML pages are generally not cached unless a rule says so, so personal pages still reach the origin.
- The origin address is hidden. Visitors see Cloudflare's address rather than the server's, which makes direct attacks on that server harder.
- Security rules run first. Requests can be filtered for floods of traffic or known attack patterns before they reach the origin.
These changes are useful, but they also mean that Cloudflare settings become part of how a site works. A misconfigured rule can cache the wrong page or block real visitors. For how the proxy setting itself behaves, see proxied vs DNS only records.
Frequently asked questions
Is Cloudflare a web host?
Not in the usual sense. Cloudflare does not normally store a website's pages or run its application. A site still needs an origin server or host that generates its content, and Cloudflare sits in front of it. Cloudflare does offer its own hosting products for some kinds of sites, but those are separate services.
Does using Cloudflare make a website faster?
It can, mainly for visitors far from the origin and for static files that are cached at the edge. Dynamic pages that are not cached still travel to the origin, so the gain depends on what the site serves. Speed also depends on the origin server itself, and a slow origin stays slow behind any proxy.