What is Cloudflare & How Does it Work? (2 minute read)

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare,  a DDC partner, is a leading security, performance, and reliability company whose platform protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing any code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

Cloudflare for Campaigns is a tool for political campaigns to defend their infrastructure from cyberattacks and unauthorized access.  Cloudflare is used for widespread purposes of increasing the security and performance of web sites and services. 

Cloudflare offers a free version to the public ( including and campaigns and organizations), which you can set up yourself or ask your your web firm to implement.  DDC  highly recommends protecting your website as a core cybersecurity protection and using the free product. 

It is also important to note that Cloudflare is an alternative to Project Shield, and you should not use both together. 

How does Cloudflare work? (this information is summarized from their website)

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. 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. 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 perform. 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.

Cloudflare also provides security by protecting Internet properties from malicious activity like DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and other nefarious intrusions. Their services run silently in the background, keeping many of the websites and services you depend on up and running.

Once you have the free Cloudflare set up, if you are an eligible campaign, you can get even more free feature upgrades.

 Cloudflare’s Project Galileo provides free upgraded services to some nonprofit organizations through an application process. 

Learn More: What is a DDoS Attack?, What is DNS?

How To: How do I set up Cloudflare?