About CloudFlare

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through their intelligent global network. CloudFlare automatically optimizes the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. It also block threats and limits abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. 

More Info about CloudFlare

CloudFlare will transparently cache the static assets on a site and serve them from CloudFlare 's servers, this should reduce the number of concurrent connections to your site. See an overview of CloudFlare here.

Tip! If customer is using CloudFlare on a system with nginx, they can set cloudflare to point to ':8080' to bypass caching.

On average, a website on CloudFlare:

• loads twice as fast
• uses 60% less bandwidth
• has 65% fewer requests
• is way more secure

Limitations

• Currently, requests must be directed to 'www.$domain' instead of '$domain' (which means you may need to make some configuration changes).
• CloudFlare may affect internal statistic programs that read directly from Apache logs. CloudFlare will not affect web-based analytic programs that use JavaScript like Google Analytics. While your logs will reflect fewer requests to your server and therefore lower load, the experience to your visitors should be unaffected.
• CloudFlare caches static content from your site. While this reduces the load on your server, it means that if you make a change to an existing static file, like an image, there may be a delay before the change appears. While you are updating your site, you can put CloudFlare in Development Mode so changes appear immediately.
• CloudFlare's basic mode cannot handle SSL certificates. If you need to use an SSL certificate, that part of your site needs to be on a subdomain that is not protected.

Cost

For basic protection CloudFlare is free. However some additional features (SSL support for CloudFlare and Live Updating Statistics) may require an additional payment. You can see more information about CloudFlare Pro by visiting CloudFlare.com.

See also Disabling CloudFlare for Your Domain, Changing Nameservers for CloudFlare