SSL
Hello website owners. Any website that involves exchanging user data should be secure for you and your user’s safety. By secure, I mean all data exchanged between your users and your server should be encrypted through the use of SSL technology. This is especially true with the proliferation of wireless devices and unsecured networks everywhere.
The good news today is that it is very easy to setup SSL on your website to secure communications through CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a global company whose mission is to protect and accelerate websites online. They recently introduced what they call Universal SSL last September for all users. This essentially provides a secure communications channel for all traffic from the users browser to CloudFlare’s servers. CloudFlare can optionally re-encrypt traffic going from their servers back to the original hosting company servers. This requires a SSL certificate and I highly recommend this for websites doing business online. In fact, it is needed. You can read more about how this works and their 3 levels of SSL offering here. https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/
For those who have the technical skills, you can check out Let’s Encrypt, a well sponsored group which provides tools to better automate the process of creating a signed SSL Certificate.
HTTP/2
There are other benefits from using CloudFlare. The 2 of which I am going to touch on are HTTP/2 and static content caching which go hand in hand. HTTP/2 is the next version of the HTTP/1.1 protocol and it offers performance gains through request multiplexing by grouping several HTTP request into one and transfer data through this one channel. You can view the demo from this site to see the potential gains. https://www.cloudflare.com/http2. Finally, CloudFlare can serve static content from their servers taking load off of your own hosting. With the many data centers throughout the world, it is very likely that the CloudFlare servers can get static content back to your users faster than your hosting servers. You can read more about their CDN here. https://www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn/
This website uses CloudFlare and I recommend that you take a look into how they can help secure and accelerate your website!
Notes:
1. I am not affiliated with CloudFlare. I do use their products and recommend them.
2. Website owners need to sign up for a free account to have CloudFlare be the primary DNS for their domain.
3. The HTTP/2 savings in request multiplexing is in TCP connection overhead, limit on the number of simultaneous TCP connections at one time, and potential unnecessary cookie data transferred linked to each HTTP request.