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What does CloudFlare actually do?
This may sound like a newbie or a dumb question given how ubiquitous CloudFlare is but what do they actually do, and how do they do it?
What are the upsides?
What are the downsides?
Does it affect you website analytics?
Are there some use cases or examples which have highlighted the advantages and disadvantages of using it?
Comments
https://www.cloudflare.com/overview
See above
Things not listed above
https://www.cloudflare.com/features-analytics
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cloudflare+experience
Honestly.
An Overview of CloudFlare
CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.
Before and After CloudFlare Illustration
CloudFlare's system gets faster and smarter as our community of users grows larger. We have designed the system to scale with our goal in mind: helping power and protect the entire Internet.
CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain, regardless of your choice in platform. From start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. Adding your website requires only a simple change to your domain's DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site's existing code. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. Our core service is free and we offer enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting or SSL.
SOURCE - https://www.cloudflare.com/overview
Does that mean that if you launch a website and connect it to CloudFlare before going live with it, or you switch servers, end users will never know your original or true IP address?
That's part of the purpose, yes. Assuming that your servers are properly configured (for example, not sending out email from your web server to users).
https://blog.cloudflare.com/ddos-prevention-protecting-the-origin/