Cloudflare in front of my site: what does it actually give me?
asked 2 months ago619 viewsen
People recommend putting Cloudflare (free plan) in front of my website. What concretely does it do, and are there downsides?
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1 Answer
On the free plan you get:
- CDN caching of static assets at edge locations, so pages load faster for users far from your server, including diaspora users on other continents. - DDoS protection and basic bot filtering. - Free TLS at the edge, plus HTTP/3 and Brotli compression. - DNS that's fast and easy to manage. - WAF managed rules and rate limiting (limited on free).
Things to get right: - Use SSL mode Full (strict), with a valid certificate on your origin (Let's Encrypt or a Cloudflare Origin CA certificate). "Flexible" leaves the Cloudflare → origin hop unencrypted. - Your app sees Cloudflare's IPs. Read the real client IP from CF-Connecting-IP, and only trust it when the request actually comes from Cloudflare. - Restrict your origin firewall to Cloudflare IP ranges, or use a Cloudflare Tunnel, so attackers can't bypass it by hitting your server's IP directly. - Be careful caching HTML for logged-in users.
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