what is Cloudflare?

So what is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks. Today, businesses, non-profits, bloggers, and anyone with an Internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare network map
Millions of Internet properties are on Cloudflare, and our network is growing by tens of thousands each day. Cloudflare powers Internet requests for millions of websites and serves 55 million HTTP requests per second on average.

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Here’s how it works:
In the early days of the Internet, when you wanted to load a website, your request would go from your computer to a server, which would then return the web page you requested.

Connection Between Computer And Server
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If too many requests came in at once, that server could be overwhelmed and crash, becoming unresponsive to anyone trying to access the resources it hosted.

Overwhelmed server
This made it difficult for owners of Internet properties to provide content that was fast, safe, and reliable. Cloudflare was created to ease these difficulties and empower users with the resources to make their sites, apps, and blogs safe and performant. This is done through the use of a powerful edge network that provides content and other services as close to you as possible, so you get the information as fast as possible.

Website with Cloudflare
You see, Einstein figured out some time ago that the speed of light is a hard upper limit on how fast you can communicate; there comes a point when the only thing you can do is move the content and computation closer! That’s why we put data centers in more than 310 cities all across the world: to give you what you’re looking for quickly!

Einstein's speed of light
Cloudflare also provides security by protecting Internet properties from malicious activity like DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and other nefarious intrusions.

Cloudflare protection
And allows website owners to easily insert applications into their websites without needing to be a developer.

Application being dropped onto a website using Cloudflare
If you’re a developer, we allow you to run Javascript code on our powerful edge network, so that you can get as close to a user as possible. This eliminates delays, and improves the experience for users like you!