Cloudflare

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Cloudflare – What is it and why would I care ?

I have been using Cloudflare for a long time.  It is one of my goto services and I use it to protect all of the public services I run for myself and other sites/ organizations.

The basic premise of what Cloudflare do is that they are a distributed Web Application Firewall (WAF) and CDN but they also offer so much more. Because they have a large number of POP’s they can cache and push content closer to your end users to give them a better experience. This also offloads work from your firewall’s, DNS, Web and Database servers.  At present they have 139 sites globally allowing you to host a site anywhere and get good global performance.

Cloudflare has an amazing free tier so you can get started easily.   I use this to host all of my public DNS records. So what does that look like?

host -a jameskilby.co.uk Trying “jameskilby.co.uk” ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 37213 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 7, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;jameskilby.co.uk. IN ANY ;; ANSWER SECTION: jameskilby.co.uk. 3789 IN RRSIG HINFO 13 3 3789

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