By Funtimeswithdanny | Reading Time: 3 Min
Cloudflare was founded in July 2009 by three co-founders: Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. Cloudflare is best known for its DNS and CDN. In this blog post i will give you five reasons you need to start using Cloudflare.
One of Cloudflare most popular services is there DNS or domain name system. When you type in a URL into your browser ex madebydannuy.uk your DNS returns the website ip address which is what your browser reads and displays all of this happens in seconds thanks to Cloudflare. Now Cloudflare is not the only DNS provider Google has one to but i can’t trust google. To switch to Cloudflare DNS change your DNS settings to point to Cloudflare (1.1.1.1).
If you ever wanted your own custom email domain. Without @gmail.com or @outlook.com you can do this for free. The way this works is when an email is sent to your custom email ex [email protected] Cloudflare forwards the email to the linked email for example [email protected]. Using Cloudflare email routing gives you peace of mind because your real email is not shown.
Just like GitHub pages Cloudflare can also be used to host websites. You can do this by uploading your files or linking to a GitHub repository. Using Cloudflare pages lets you control your sites all on one dashboard. If you do not have a domain name Cloudflare gives you one for free. Cloudflare pages is fast and easy to set up. With over 300+ servers anyone can access your website fast.
Cloudflare tunnels is a free and easy to use VPN. Cloudflare tunnels is self-hosted VPN. You link your domain name to your tunnel and connect to a local Ip address. So, let’s say I have Uptime Kuma running on10.0.0.233:3030. You add the Ip address to your tunnel and link a domain name. So now if you go to uptimekuma.yourdomainname.com to will be sent to your Uptime Kuma dashboard. You can add On Time Pin or GitHub OAuth to make it more secure.
Cloudflare has a fast and powerful CDN or Content Devlivery Network across the Golde with over 300 locations. This lets you cache your website everywhere to lower load times to your website. But with Cloudflare R2 which is the same idea of a AWS S3 Buket. MBD CDN is backed by R2. R2 lets you store anything. By linking your domain, you get a custom domain for your files Cloudflare gives you 5gigs for free. By going to mbduk-cdn.madebydanny.uk/icon.png you are served an image from Cloudflare R2.
All the services I showed you from Cloudflare are free but most of them require that you have a Domain name witch you can buy from Cloudflare or another domain provider. I will have more detailed videos coming soon.
