A while back when I was starting this blog I was searching for a way to mitigate the possibilities of a DDOS or other attack against my site. Now this is a small site running on a pair of virtual machines, so it would not take much to knock it off the net. A friend in the cloud space mentioned cloudflare.com. I was a bit of a skeptic when I first looked over their site but within a few days of using it, I could not be happier. I have used the service for almost a year now and I’m a very satisfied customer.

They have a ton of great services documented well here. they include such things as:

• Added layer of security and DDOS Mitigation
• built in CDN
• Web Analytics
• Application optimization

One of the undocumented feature I found to be useful is the ability to completely obscure the real location of my web servers. Using cloudflare along with a private whois service and manicured DNS records there is no way to locate my server behind the cloudflare service, from a security stand point this is a nice addition to an already great service. This limits the attack surface to just web applications so you don’t have to worry about as many attack vectors.

The service comes in two price structures a free basic service (HTTP only) and a ‘Pro’ service for $20/month that adds tons of great features documented here. I would strongly recommend this service to anyone hosting sites today. The added security and the CDN service alone more than pay for the monthly fee for the ‘Pro’ account.

Overall an amazing value add for the small and large bloggers looking to make their sites faster and more secure.

- No-Mad