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Using CloudFlare

by Alejandro Liu
in 2013

tagged editor, network, proxy, security, service, settings, speed

Updated: 2021-12-25

So I have signed up 0ink.net to use the CloudFlare service.

CFLogo

CloudFlare is a reverse proxy service that is supposed to speed up and improve web server security.

This is done by:

  • globally distributed reverse proxy cache network
  • filters incoming request for attacks
  • optimize content (i.e. compressing, removing redundnat text, etc).
  • improving retrieving of web pages that have multiple components.

For it to work they need to take over your DNS service. That means that your DNS records resolve to CloudFlare servers. So when editing your DNS records, the CloudFlare DNS editor has an extra settings that allows you to control if that DNS entry would use the CloudFlare network or not.

So if you want to be able to access your web server (i.e. www) for ftp or ssh, then you need to create an additinional CNAME record that points to the web server but set to by-pass the CloudFlare network.

Some tips on what to do after install cloudflare can be found here.

This is handy command to test if your web-server is having problems but not CloudFlare

 curl -v -A firefox/4.0 -H 'Host: yourdomain.com' YourServerIP