I recommend everyone who is on shared hosting to try this new service, Cloudflare. It’s a free service that boosts your sites speed and security massively. They also do pro accounts for $20 a month with more features, but the free version will be fine for most people.

Created in part by the Project Honeypot team, responsible for creating and maintaining a large list of blacklisted IP’s of hackers and spammers, it can help you reduce the cost of your hosting if you get a certain amount of bandwidth. It works by taking a snapshot of your pages and serving it from their site when people visit your pages, which results in a much faster website speed; Google ranks pages higher if your pages loads quickly. Also if you website goes down you users will be served the cached version via Cloudflare’s servers, so in theory you should have zero downtime!

It also aids security by scanning users who visit your site before they even get to it. If it thinks they are suspicious then it will give them a page with a CAPTCHA image that they have to type to verify they are human first. It checks for any vulnerabilities that the users try and exploit and can block them on the fly.

You get managed access over the entire process through their control panel, letting you customise the entire experience to your users.

I would say you need a moderate amount of experience to do this with your own site, it involves changing DNS and Name Server records with your domain registrar so that you can route your traffic through Cloudflare’s servers. We do provide this service to our clients if you’re hosted with us though, so you might even already be using the service.

Feel free to contact us for more information.

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