Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a connectivity cloud company that runs one of the world's largest networks. Websites, applications and corporate networks route traffic through Cloudflare to make them faster, more secure and more reliable, and a significant share of all websites use its services. It started with two core services that remain central today. Its content delivery network caches and serves website content from data centres in hundreds of cities, reducing load times for visitors around the world. Its security services protect sites from attacks: distributed denial-of-service mitigation absorbs massive traffic floods, a web application firewall blocks common exploits, bot management filters automated abuse, and SSL certificates encrypt traffic. A generous free plan made these protections available to small sites, and Cloudflare's DNS service is among the fastest and most widely used. Cloudflare has expanded in three major directions. For developers, Workers runs serverless code on its global network, with storage products such as R2 object storage, D1 databases and KV, plus Pages for hosting, making Cloudflare a full application platform; it has also added AI inference on its network. For enterprises, Cloudflare One provides zero-trust network access, secure web gateways and other services that replace traditional VPNs and network appliances. And it offers consumer and network services such as the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver and WARP. The free tier covers many small sites, with paid plans adding advanced security, performance features and support, and usage-based pricing for developer products. Because so much of the internet depends on Cloudflare, outages affecting its network can have wide impact, and its role in deciding which sites to serve has occasionally been controversial. Alternatives include Akamai and Fastly for content delivery and edge security; AWS CloudFront and Shield for AWS-centric teams; Vercel and Netlify for front-end hosting; Zscaler and Netskope for zero-trust security; Bunny.net for affordable CDN; and Google Cloud Armor. Choose Cloudflare when you want a fast, secure front door for your site or application, starting free.