](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7139602929/ "Screen Shot 2012-05-01 at 5.12.05 PM by dbillian, on Flickr")

Editor's Note: This post was co-authored with Ray Bejjani, CloudFlare's engineer that was the lead for this project.

As the internet has grown, phishing attacks have continued to be a problem. While better awareness and focus on security has helped reduce their number, the RSA and other services tracking phishing still show that somewhere between 20-30,000 phishing attacks generally occur every month. In the past, criminals used to launch most of these phishing attacks through email but they have now switched to hacking sites to better hide their tracks and dupe more unsuspecting consumers into divulging their personal information unknowingly to fraudsters. This can become a difficult problem for less technical users that wish to participate and contribute to the World Wide Web.

Given our position in the internet ecosystem, we often receive phishing reports via our abuse channel. Previously, this meant a manual process to notify the appropriate parties especially the site owner. We felt we could serve our customers better, and their customers in turn, with a solution unique to CloudFlare. When we have identified a URL that is phishing we notify the owner and provide them summary information and notifications when they log in. We also begin serving a warning page in place of the bad URL. This page can be bypassed by the visitor at their preference.

• Our mission is to help make the web faster and safer.

• We can block phishing pages as soon as they are reported to us. This provides the following benefits to sites using CloudFlare:

  • Stops site visitors from potentially falling victim to identity theft

  • Stops site owners from being penalized for unknowingly hosting phishing content. Many search engines will blocklist your site if you're hosting malicious content, which only compounds the issue for site owners that don't know that they have been compromised

  • We can quickly notify site owners about the issue on their site quickly so they can clean up the malicious files.

If you're interested in protecting your site, whether you have been hacked or not, you can take the following steps that can secure your site:

1. Use SSL on your site to encrypt information between your site and your server.

2. In addition to providing a layer of security to your site already, CloudFlare has partnered with a number of app providers that can help further protect site owners from malicious intrusions and provide additonal site monitoring.

3. Always update your site's CMS platform, plugins and server software. If you have a notification from your provider that there is a software update available, these updates were probably done to fix known exploits that have shown up since the last release to the plugin or platform. Since doing these updates often only takes a few minutes or so, you can save yourself from a potential world of hurt by doing it "now" instead of "later".

CloudFlare will send you an email advising you as to what pages on your site are phishing content. You will also see a message on your 'My Websites' page when a domain has pages blocked for a phishing report, with a link to take you to more information about the report.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7133443373/ "Screen Shot 2012-05-01 at 2.41.45 PM by dbillian, on Flickr")

1. If you are an experienced web administrator, chances are you already know how to remove the page(s) from your site. Remove the pages in question and then request a review that will be processed by the abuse team.

2. If you are not an experienced web administrator, we would recommend that you contact your hosting provider for assistance in removing the pages. You should then request the review so we can confirm the phishing pages have been removed.

If you see a site on the CloudFlare network that has a phishing page, please report the site to us via our abuse form.

Please be sure to include the following in the report:

• The domain in question

• The actual page that the phishing link is located on.

We have more exciting things on the way to help protect internet users from phishing and malware. Please stay tuned to CloudFlare updates for more developments.

CloudFlare has partnered with a number of CloudFlare Certified Partners to make it simple for website owners that want a faster and safer website. Since signing up for CloudFlare through a hosting partner is different than signing up for CloudFlare directly, we wanted to provide some quick tips to help you get the most out of your CloudFlare experience.

1. You do not need to change your name servers when activating through a hosting partner. You would still manage your DNS entries at your hosting provider or registrar.

2. CloudFlare can only be enabled for CNAME records when activating through a hosting partner. To enable CloudFlare on your root domain (yourdomain.com), which is an A record, you need to have your hosting partner set a 301 redirect from your root domain to www. Not only will the redirect help accelerate and protect the root domain, this will also make the statistics in your CloudFlare account accurate. Note: If you have a naked domain, 'yourdomain.com', and you don't want your visitors to go to 'www.yourdomain.com', then you need to signup directly with CloudFlare.

3. What you should do if you see any of the following error messages after enabling CloudFlare:

"Host Not Configured to Serve Web Traffic" error message will appear on the first request to your site after activating through a partner, then will go away after a few minutes. If it lasts for more than 10 minutes,then contact your hosting provider and our support teams will work together to resolve.

"CloudFlare-nginx 502 Bad Gateway": This is an issue on the CloudFlare network. We deal with these quickly (less than 10 minutes). We publish all announcements regarding our network status on @CloudFlareSys.

"Website is Unavailable": Either your server is offline and we don't have a copy of your site in cache or something on the origin server is blocking CloudFlare's IPs.

If your server is online, then work with your hosting provider to find out what could be blocking CloudFlare's IPs on your server. The most common culprit is a security solution like a firewall like CSF or IP tables. As soon as the block is removed, the error page will disappear.

SSLIf you have SSL on the domain(s), you will need to upgrade to a Pro account. The cost for a Pro account is $20.00 per month for the first website and $5.00 for each additional site. In addition to the SSL support, you will also receive additional security and performance benefits.

Note: You will find the option to upgrade to Pro in your CloudFlare account.

Development ModeIf you are making changes to the static content on your website, temporarily bypass CloudFlare's cache so any changes appear immediately. You can find Development Mode either right in your hosting provider's control panel or by logging in to your CloudFlare account under CloudFlare Settings.

PageRulesPageRules gives you more powerful performance and configuration options, including:Advanced Caching ConfigurationsExcluding URLS from CloudFlare's default caching and security optionsSetting URL forwards and redirects

CloudFlare has developed web content optimization features called Rocket Loader and Auto Minify. Both Rocket Loader and Auto Minify are designed to load your site's resources even faster than the default CloudFlare configuration.

Rocket LoaderRocket Loader will speed up the delivery of your pages by automatically asynchronously loading your JavaScript resources. Rocket Loader works well for websites that have a lot of ads, widgets or plugins.

Auto MinifyRemoves all unnecessary characters from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to reduce file size.

Note: Both of these features are still in beta. If you encounter any issues, such as a broken plugin or JavaScript not working properly, then please turn the feature off and report any bugs to our team.

To turn on Rocket Loader and Auto Minify, you need to log in to your CloudFlare account and go to CloudFlare Settings.

IPv6 GatewayMake your website IPv6 compatible, by turning on the CloudFlare IPv6 gateway.

The CloudFlare Support Center has answers to a number of questions. Searching our knowledge base is the fastest way to get a quick response to the majority of questions. Don't see the answer to your question? Please contact CloudFlare.

We frequently post about product updates, early beta access to new features, system issues, and giveaways, so we recommend that you follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Google+:

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Google+

Thank you for joining CloudFlare in partnership with your hosting provider.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/6893885124/ "Getting to CloudFlare DNS settings by dbillian, on Flickr")

We have further clarified what an orange cloud and gray cloud mean in your CloudFlare DNS zone file. While users have always been able to turn CloudFlare on or off on a record, many of them were a little confused on what this actually did and didn't know how to do it. If you want to exclude a certain subdomain from CloudFlare's proxy and cache, simply click on the orange cloud to move it to a gray record.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7039980997/ "CloudFlare Orange and Gray Clouds by dbillian, on Flickr")

If you need to edit an existing DNS record, such as if you need to change your server IP, you can simply edit the records to point go the new server IP address. The right side of the page shows a gear icon that opens up the editing options.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7051773439/ "Screen Shot 2012-04-06 at 2.13.42 PM by dbillian, on Flickr")

Clicking on the edit record option let's you modify the fields, then you would save the record when you're done making the change.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7039980861/ "Editing Record by dbillian, on Flickr")

If you need to add a new DNS record, you can do this by scrolling to the bottom of the page for DNS settings. You would then choose the record type and add the appropriate values for that record type.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7051801489/ "Adding DNS Records by dbillian, on Flickr")

If a subdomain on your site isn't working, the most common issue is that you didn't add the subdomain to your zone file when you configured the domain. If you are missing a subdomain called "blog", which translates to blog.yourdomain.com, then you simply need to add the missing record as an A record or CNAME.

A record has to point to a server IP address:

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7051801437/ "Adding record A record by dbillian, on Flickr")

CNAME records can be entered as an alias:

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7051801467/ "Adding Record CNAME by dbillian, on Flickr")

If your mail isn't working for your domain, then the issue is you don't have your mail or MX records configured properly in your zone file (or they are missing). You need to add the records in your zone file andmake sure that they are presented in the correct format.

Since configuring mail and MX records is a frequent contact for CloudFlare support, we thought that highlighing Google Apps email record entries would be a good one to show visually.

The first thing you would want to make sure is added for Google Apps mail is a CNAME record that points to ghs.google.com.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7039980893/ "Google mail records CNAME by dbillian, on Flickr")

You would then want to make sure that the records for Google's mail servers are added in your zone field in the format below (note: you will have more than the three entries shown).

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7039980927/ "Google MX records by dbillian, on Flickr")

Note: Please make sure all mail records have a gray cloud next to them. If you add the record and it creates an orange cloud, please click on the cloud to move it to gray.

Have a suggestion about improving the DNS editor? Please feel free to contact CloudFlare with any suggestions. You can also send us a quick Tweet or message on Facebook.

Note: The CloudFlare 'DNS Settings' page has also undergone some changes. Since the changes to that page are worthy of a separate post, I'll do an additional post about DNS settings in the near future.

Site owners can now add multiple domains at once. To add multiple websites, list them in the My websites input field separated by commas.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/6862983818/ "Screen Shot 2012-03-23 at 11.50.35 AM by dbillian, on Flickr")

We've made it easier to find the most popular pages, including:

• 'Dashboards' has been replaced with 'Analytics' and 'Threat Control' to save users from having to do an additional click to get to the CloudFlare Reporting and Threat Control Dashboards.

• Development Mode, one of our most widely used features, can now be turned on directly from they My Websites pag, by choosing the gear icon

• 'Deactivate' has been renamed 'Pause CloudFlare'. We hope the new terminology helps customers understand how to temporarily pause CloudFlare in the event of an issue.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/6862983856/ "Screen Shot 2012-03-23 at 11.50.55 AM by dbillian, on Flickr")

The new 'Settings' page makes it easier to find the setting you're looking for by classifying them with different tabs.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/7009100639/ "Screen Shot 2012-03-23 at 11.51.20 AM by dbillian, on Flickr")

Settings OverviewThe 'Settings Overview' stores the most frequently used CloudFlaresettings so that site owners can access these quickly. You can alsoquickly make basic changes to your Security and Performance settings onthis page. The key settings that you will find here are:

• Development Mode and Cache Purge

• A SSL drop down menu for turning on SSL options for paid accounts

• CloudFlare's IPv6 Gateway

Security SettingsCloudFlare offers a number of security features to protect websites. All of the key CloudFlare security settings have been grouped into a single page, including:

• Basic Security Level

• Customize Challenge Page

• Web Application Firewall

Performance SettingsCloudFlare's CDN-like and Web Content Optimization features are grouped on this page. If you want to adjust your CloudFlare caching level, or if you want to turn Auto Minify or Rocket Loader on or off, then this is where you would want to go.

We hope you like the changes to the UI. As always, please contact CloudFlare with anyquestions or feedback about the new UI.

^{Mother Temple of Besakih in Bali, indonesia by dbillian, on Flickr}

Editor's Note: Since the post has the word "steps" in it, I thought I would include a picture of some steps from a visit to Mother Temple of Besakih in Bali, Indonesia. I had the good fortune of visiting Bali in 2011, and the most amazing thing about the temple is that it is built on the slopes of an active volcano.

CloudFlare's core value is that we speed up and protect any website. For new and current users, we wanted to pull together a handy guide that helps you get the most out of CloudFlare.

1. Best way to Resolve an Issue - 'Pause'

When you sign up for CloudFlare, the service should just work. However, if you notice a problem after activating CloudFlare, do not change nameservers away from CloudFlare. Instead, temporarily deactivate CloudFlare by choosing the 'pause' or 'deactivate' option on your CloudFlare My Websites Page:

Settings → Pause/Deactivate CloudFlare

Changing name servers away from CloudFlare makes it difficult to troubleshoot. If you 'pause' the service, the issue will likely be immediately resolved. Then, contact our technical support team so we can work with you to resolve the root cause.

Also see: Troubleshooting CloudFlare Problems

2. Preserving IP information --> Install modcloudflare (or equivalent)

Since CloudFlare acts as a reverse proxy for websites, CloudFlare's IPs are going to show in your server logs. There is an easy fix to restore original visitor IP for any web server.

If you have issues with things like GeoIP or .htaccess blocks not working properly on your site, installing mod_cloudflare will resolve the problem immediately.

You should also allowlist all of CloudFlare's IP addresses with your hosting provider and on your server.

Note: This is not required if you have activated CloudFlare through a CloudFlare CertifiedPartner.

3. Create PageRules

PageRules gives you more performance and configuration options, including:

• Cache HTML (our default configuration only caches these static content files)

• Exclude certain URLs from CloudFlare features and caching

• 302 redirects

We recommend that you use PageRules to exclude the admin section of yourwebsite from CloudFlare's services. This will ensure you don't see any error messages or have issues updating plugins. The PageRule you will need to create has the following structure for WordPress:

*mydomain.com/wp-admin

4. Familiarize yourself with the CloudFlare settings

CloudFlare offers a number of optional security and performance options that can be turned on or off on your "Settings" page:

My Websites → Settings → CloudFlare settings

Some of the key features that we'd like to highlight:

Make your website IPv6 compatible without having to purchase expensive hardware. CloudFlare's IPv6 Gateway is available to all customers free of charge.

Rocket Loader and Auto Minify are free beta features that will help speed up your website. What they do:

**Rocket Loader:**If you have ads, widgets or plugins on your website, Rocket Loader will speed up the delivery of your pages by automatically asynchronously loading your JavaScript resources.

Auto Minify: Removes unnecessary characters from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to save on file size.

Note: These features are still in beta. We encourage you to try them but if you see an issue, then just turn them off. Please report the bugs to CloudFlare so our magical engineers can work on fixes.

SSL support can be added to any website on CloudFlare on a paid account.

Paid plans offer additional security and performance features than free accounts. You can see the differences in our comparison chart.

5. Check out the CloudFlare App Store

CloudFlare has partnered with a number of popular web applications to make adding these apps easy. You can get access to any of these services without touching your code or worrying about if they will interfere with another service on your site. The most popular services include:

• Google Analytics : Install Google Analytics on all of your pages

• VigLink: Make money from the content on your website or blog

• CodeGuard: Back up your website content

• Highlight: Add contextual search with one click to your site (developed by CloudFlare)

6. Search our Knowledge Base for FAQs

While we love answering questions from our customers as quickly as possible, many questions can be answered by doing a quick search through CloudFlare's help content.

7. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter

We use Facebook and Twitter as our primary communication channels for announcing new product releases, known system issues and to give users early access to beta features. If you want to know as much as you can about CloudFlare, or if you only have a really quick question to ask, Facebook and Twitter are the best places to go. We also recently launched a Google+ page.

If you ever have a question, please contact us. We read every email that we get and love to hear from our users.

Debugging technical issues online can be tricky. There are many moving pieces; it can be an isolated network connection with the ISP, an issue with your server or one of Cloudflare's data centers could be temporarily having a problem. We wanted to share some tips on how to troubleshoot website issues and provide some good techniques to prevent site issues in the future.

If you can't get to your website and you see a cached copy of your website or a "Your Website is Unavailable" error page, the first thing to do is to check if your server is having issues.

For Mac Users:Open the application called terminal on your Mac, and run the following curl command to see if your server is responding:

curl -v -A firefox/4.0 -H 'Host: yourdomain.com' YourServerIP

--> YourServerIP: You can get the IP for your server origin by checking your DNS Settings page on your Cloudflare account. It will look something like 192.73.146.94

• CURL for Windows

• CURL for Linux

When you press enter, you'll get an output message.

If you get an error message like "can't connect to host" or "500 internal server error", then this means that your server is not responding. You should contact your hosting provider and work with them to resolve the server issue.

If you get HTML returned, but you still get a site offline or unavailable message from Cloudflare, then this means that connections fromCloudflare's IPs are being restricted or blocked at either the hosting provider or server level. Please make sure that the CloudFlare IP addresses are allowlisted on your server and with your host.

Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy. As a result, you can still access cPanel or use FTP, but you will have to do so a little differently. To access cPanel or FTP:

• Accessing cPanel with Cloudflare

• Using FTP with Cloudflare

Cloudflare has two beta features that speed up the loading of your web pages, but they can sometimes cause issues.

Rocket LoaderRocket Loader can potentially impact JavaScript calls on your site, including things that potentially use jQuery. For example, if you see an ad widget breaking, it is possible that Rocket Loader is breaking the JavaScript and you should turn this feature off by going to your Cloudflare Settings page.

If you want to keep Rocket Loader turned on for the performance boosts, you can make some edits for the service to ignore certain scripts on your site.

Note: Rocket Loader is defaulted to off upon signup. Once you turn it on or off, the change takes less than 3 minutes to take effect.

Auto MinifyAuto Minify rarely impacts CSS and JavaScript. However, Auto Minify can sometimes cause issues if you already have another minification service turned on. We recommend that you only have one minify option turned on for your website.

If you're making changes to the static content Cloudflare caches on your site, including changes to JavaScript, CSS or images, it can be very easy to forget that you need to turn Cloudflare Development Mode on to bypass our cache so these changes appear immediately.If you forgot to turn on Development Mode when making the changes, you can always purge your Cloudflare cache to have these changes appear immediately. Just a reminder that by purging the cache for your website, there will be a performance impact for a couple of hours.

The most important step you can take is to make sure that your server or hosting provider has the Cloudflare IP ranges allowlisted. If any attempts to connect to your site are blocked or limited in any way, this could create connectivity issues to your site for some of your visitors.Another very important step you can take is to install mod_cloudflare (which is an Apache module) on your server. mod_cloudflare will restore the original visitor IP back to your server logs, and is also a good way to reduce the probability that your hosting provider will limit connections from CloudFlare's IPs. If you are not using Apache, we have a list of solutions for nginx, Windows and others in the CloudFlare Support Forums.

Cloudflare runs 14 data centers around the world. Sometimes issues arise at one of our data centers, and we deal with these quickly (on average, in less than 10 minutes). Only visitors in that geographic region are affected.

• We make all announcements on CloudFlare's System Status Twitter handle.

• If you do not use Twitter, you can also follow updates on the Cloudflare system status page.

1. Check to make sure your server is online (see instructions on to do this above)

2. If your server is online, make sure Cloudflare's IPs are not being blocked

3. If your server is online and Cloudflare's IP are not being blocked, send us the report here. In your email, include:i) Your websiteii) Where the visitor is geographically located (Issues are almost always isolated to one of our data centers. By knowing where they are located, we can investigate much quicker)iii) A description of the error page they are seeingiv) The output of a traceroute (if possible)

4. Temporarily deactivate Cloudflare for your website by choosing‘Deactivate' from your Cloudlare control panel. Choosing deactivate means that CloudFlare will continue to resolve DNS for your website, but none of your traffic will pass through our performance and security network. If it is a CloudFlare issue, this will immediately resolve the problem and our team can investigate the report. Once we've identified what is wrong, you will easily be able to reactivate CloudFlare. Note: You do not need to change your name servers.

I hope these tips help you troubleshoot some of the common issues users have on Cloudlare. Please let us know if there are any other areas of confusion that we can address in either our help section or in another Cloudflare blog post.

As you may have noticed recently, our engineers have been releasing a bunch of new products over the past few weeks. In addition to a vastly improved and cheaper option for adding CloudFlare SSL to domains, we've also made a few changes that may have been missed with the SSL changes.

1. CloudFlare has updated the CloudFlare WordPress plugin to reflect new IP addresses we've added to the CloudFlare network. We're waiting on approval to get the new IP addresses updated in the CloudFlare Joomla extension as well.

2. CloudFlare added some new CloudFlare IP address ranges for both IpV4 and IpV6. Customers should make sure that they have updated mod_cloudflare to reflect these changes.

3. CloudFlare has recently launched a much improved version of CloudFlare invoices that you can find in your billing history.

4. CloudFlare's SSL now has three different SSL setting options.

5. A new CloudFlare datacenter in the United Kingdom.

6. Dome9 has been added to our growing list of app partners.

1. A new look to the overview page for 'My Websites'.

2. A new look to the CloudFlare 'Settings' page.

3. A new tier of billing service (stay tuned).

Have other suggestions about what we can do to improve the CloudFlare service? Send us a message with what you would like to see CloudFlare develop next.

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/3146028677/ "Sumatran Tiger: San Francisco Zoo by dbillian, on Flickr")Editor's Note: Some of you may be asking why CloudFlare is using an image of a tiger for something related to the CloudFlare API. Since Ian Pye of CloudFlare is our API lead, I asked Ian what image he would like in the blog post about the API. His response to me: "A tiger. Our API is like a tiger. Oh, and everyone likes tigers." So, now you know the story of why a tiger is in the CloudFlare API post.

As many of our Facebook fans and Twitter followers may have noticed recently, CloudFlare has been spending a fair amount of time recently asking what we can do to improve the service. One of the most startling revelationsto me was that many of our customers don't know we have a CloudFlare API that mimics many of the features found in your CloudFlare settings' page, even though we have the API fairly well documented in the CloudFlare Forums, so I thought I would put together a little "cheat sheet" for frequently used API features.

1. You will need to get your API key for your account first. You can locate the API key by going to your 'My Account' page.

2. Each zone (yourdomain.com) on CloudFlare has a unique number identifier. If you need to locate the zoneid for a domain, simply go to the "Reports and Stats' link for that domain (the zone id appears at the end with an equal sign, such as zid=xxxxxx).

3. Your account email address.

4. You may interface with the API via HTTPS POST or GET requests to www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html

Development ModeIf you plan on making changes to the static content CloudFlare caches on your site, it is best for you go to Development Mode first to bypass the CloudFlare cache so these changes appear immediately.

Purge CloudFlare cacheIf you want to purge your CloudFlare cache, or if you forgot to go to Development Mode when making changes to your site, you may purge your CloudFlare cache so that these changes appear. You would only want to do this when you really want to purge all the static content CloudFlare has stored in the cache for that domain. Purging is not selectively done by file extension or file name.

Pulling basic statistics for your siteOne of the most common requests we get from our users is that they would like to share their statistics with clients without providing login details to the account. While we currently don't offer a way for people to access an account with a "read only" option, you can use the API to grab basic CloudFlare statistics from your account.

Reporting spam back to CloudFlareWhile the reporting spam back to CloudFlare API option has been fairly well documented on our blog already, you would use this option if CloudFlare's data sources don't catch some sources of spam that make it through to websites (we're always looking to improve).

Since we rely on our community of websites to alert us to online threats reported to us through the API or threat control, it actually helps make our system smarter for all sites on the system and can help stop spam from hitting other sites as well.

Updating your screen capture on your challenge pageIf the look and feel of your site changes frequently, you probably want to update the image associated with your CloudFlare challenge (captcha) page on a regular basis so your visitors know that they are hitting your site.

The specific calls and parameters for using each of these API functions can be found in the CloudFlare Client Interface API.

Have a suggestion about improving the API? Please contact CloudFlare with any requests.

CloudFlare is a service that utilizes proprietary technology to make websites run safer and faster around the world. We currently run 12 data centers (with more on the way) on three continents to provide static content caching, bot filtering and more for all of our users. CloudFlare has created a "pocket guide" for users that have signed up with CloudFlare through a hosting partner cPanel integration.

1. Familiarize yourself with the CloudFlare Settings pageThe CloudFlare Settings page is where you will find all of the key optional features that can be turned on or off. Atlhough some CloudFlare Settings can be found in the control panel for your hosting provider, there are additional key features you can only find on CloudFlare's site including:

There are two beta services we have developed to help speed up websites for our users free of charge, while also not requiring any special configuration on your end.

Rocket Loader makes the JavaScript on your pages load faster by loading the resources asynchronously. If you have ads on your website or any social widgets including Facebook Like, Twitter or Google +, Rocket Loader will make your website feel snappier to your visitors. This service is still in beta, so while we encourage you to try it on your site, if you notice any issues with your apps afterwards, turn it off and then file a bug report.

Auto Minify automatically minifies your code in real-time without you having to change anything or install any plugins.

This service is also in beta, so if you see any issues, you can easily turn it off.

You can set the security level for your website to high, medium, low or essentially off. It defaults to Medium.

Turn this option on when you're making changes to static files (javascript, CSS, images, etc.) on your site that you want to appear immediately.

If you want to clear the CloudFlare cache of all the static files, you can use the Purge Cache option. This is only recommended if you want to remove all of the static content we have cached. The drawback to purging the cache is that you will temporarily lose the performance benefits until the cache rebuilds which can take up to 1 day. If you only want to purge resources related to a recent site change then I recommend that you use Development Mode.

2. Familiarize yourself with your Reporting and Threat Control pagesThe CloudFlare reporting page will show you statistics about visitors and pageviews for your site, including information about when your site was last crawled by a search engine.

The CloudFlare Threat Control page is where you can find out about visitors to your site that were challenged, and is also where you can manage access to your website by allowlisting and blocklisting IPs.

3. Check out CloudFlare's optional appsCloudFlare has recently partnered with a number of great services to add applications on your site with a few clicks of your mouse. Some of the most popular applications include:

• Google Analytics: Install Google Analytics to all of your web pages

• Pingdom: Monitor your website's performance and uptime

• Viglink: Monetize your blog or website with affiliate links

CloudFlare Apps includes a mix of Free and Paid services.

4. Follow us on Facebook or TwitterCloudFlare proactively helps customers resolve basic service issues using these social media channels. In addition to handling basic questions about the service, we often solicit feedback from our users to see what we can do to make the service even better. Oh, and we sometimes surprise our followers with giveaways like CloudFlare t-shirts and CloudFlare laptop stickers.

FacebookTwitter

5. Bookmark our Status PageWe run 12 data centers on three continents - with even more on the way to serve our global customer base - and we are constantly monitoring our systems. To get the most current updates about known service issues, you can follow the:

CloudFlare System status pageCloudFlare Twitter System Status

6. Why should I upgrade to Pro? And how do I upgrade to Pro?With the Pro service, you receive four main additional benefits that free accounts don't have:

1. Faster subsequent page loads (so the second, third and fourth page loads are much quicker)

2. Web Application Firewall to protect from comment spam, SQL injection and XSS attacks

3. SSL compatibility

4. Stats updates every 15 minutes (vs 24 hours)

The Pro service is done on a month by month basis so you can easily try it for a month by choosing "Upgrade to Pro" in your CloudFlare account.

You can upgrade to Pro by going to your CloudFlare settings for the domain you would like to upgrade to pro.

Please do the following to upgrade to Pro:CloudFlare->My Websites->Settings >CloudFlare Settings-> Change from Free to Pro to open the billing information page->then come back to the settings page for the domain to make sure you change the domain from free to Pro.

Have additional questions? Have a suggestion to help improve the CloudFlare service? Please contact us.

WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform on Cloudflare, with many WordPress users taking advantage of the fact that Cloudflare's free CDN can help speed up their sites by caching static content and distributing that content to Cloudflare's datacenters around the world. Because WordPress is such a popular blogging platform, I thought I would include some other helpful tips to help speed up your WordPress blog using Cloudflare and provide some other quick tips about optimizing your Wordpress site.

Cloudflare tools for WordPress users:

1. Cloudflare is complementary service to other caching plugins you may be using for WordPress, including W3TC (W3 Total Cache). You can even configure CloudFfare settings directly in W3TC.

2. Use Cloudflare's Auto Minify to eliminate the white space in JavaScript, CSS and HTML. While the white space is great for humans reading code, it actually takes machines a little longer to read the code when it isn't minified. Instead of installing yet another plugin to optimize your site, Cloudflare can do this automatically for you on the fly.

3. Use Cloudflare's Rocket Loader to load your JavaScript asynchronously.

4. If you're using plugins for services like Google Analytics, consider removing the plugin from WordPress so that Cloudflare can automatically add your Google Analytics code to all of your pages through our Cloudflare Apps integration.

Some other tips to speed up your WordPress blog:

1. Don't install too many plugins.While there is no hard rule for how many plugins you should have active on WordPress, it generally seems that having no more than 10-12 active plugins is a fairly safe bet to have active. I recently saw a post online where someone had 44 plugins active on their blog, which only slows things down because each plugin is creating another call to another service.

2. Remove any inactive plugins.If you're not using a plugin on your WordPress blog, remove it if you have no plans to use the plugin again.

3. Don't have too many social media buttons on your site.While having social media plugins and social bookmarking options on your site is indeed important for your blog's traffic and visibility, you don't want to overload your blog with widgets and bookmarking options. Find one or two that cover the major social media services well, then remove any additional plugins.

4. Optimize your imagesThere are a number of options for optimizing and compressing images on your WordPress site.

Also See: Cloudflare WordPress Plugin

We get a number of questions about using CloudFlare with e-commerce sites in customer service. CloudFlare works great at making e-commerce sites faster and protecting them against attacks. I thought I would try to address many of the key questions in a handy guide that you can use to reduce the probability of having issues with your e-commerce site.

You should make sure that you don't have any rules in your .htacess or iptables that are blocking CloudFlare's requests from our IPs. If you have other security solutions in place prior to joining CloudFlare, these may interfere with CloudFlare's ability to connect to your site. Allowlisting our IP ranges will help avoid "Site Offline" messages caused when we cannot reach your server from our network. You can findthe current list of CloudFlare's IPs in our FAQ.

CloudFlare works as a reverse proxy, which means traffic passes through our network where it is cleaned and accelerated before being passed on to your origin server. This means that, by default, your server will usually see a CloudFlare IP. Since e-commerce sites have a lot of reasons to see a visitor's original IP (e.g., preventing credit card fraud, customizing content based on a visitor's geo location, etc.), sites using CloudFlare can benefit from using one of the quick and easy techniques to show visitor IPs to server logs. All our hosting provider partners have already installed mod_cloudflare, or an equivalent, so if you're using one of them you should be set.

Since traffic passes through CloudFlare before going to your origin server, if you use SSL on your site you'll either need to set it up on a domain that isn't proxied through CloudFlare, or we'll need to install aSSL certificate for your domain on our network. We've worked with one of the oldest certificate authority partners to make SSL certs that work on our network easy and inexpensive. The full process for SSL and CloudFlare is outlined here.

While CloudFlare will generally get many common subdomain records duringthe process in which you add a domain, customized subdomains may not be picked up and you should make sure that these are correctly added in your CloudFlare DNS settings. In other words, if you have some part of your site hosted at mrscruffypants.yoursite.com, just make sure you add it when you first set up your site.

CloudFlare will not hurt dynamic content performance at all. Since CloudFlare only caches staticcontent, such as images and CSS, we wouldn't cause any issues for HTML or PHP. In fact, our system was written to be able to optimize dynamic content with options like minification on the fly without slowing it down orrequiring it to be cached. This means any changes you make to your content are reflected immediately on your site.

CloudFlare includes the geo location of visitors in the header of every request so if you don't already run a geo location database you can extract this information and begin using it. If you already do geo location based on IPs, you can continue it exactly as before as long as you are on one of CloudFlare's hosting provider partners or you are using one of the quick and easy techniques to retrieve your visitor's original IP address.

CloudFlare caches staticcontent based on the file extension of the content (for example, images and css on your site). So your company's logo will get cached, but if you update the pricing or an item's description on your site it will show up immediately. We quickly detect even changes to static files like images, but if you ever need to clear the cache you can do so with a singleclick of the "Purge Cache" button on the CloudFlareSettings page.

Thousands of e-commerce sites use CloudFlare to better sell goods online. If you have any questions about your particular site, don't hesitate to contact us with any questions.

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5934859823/ "multiplicity-II-pagination by dbillian, on Flickr")

CloudFlare gets a lot of questions about caching and our free CDN (content delivery network), so I thought I would put together a really quick guide about what CloudFlare caches and more.

Distributing your static content with CloudFlare's CDN will lead to faster page loading times for your visitors. As visitors are more inclined to bounce away from a slow loading site, you will reduce your bounce rate and increase the amount of time that people spend on your site. Or, in other words, a faster a website means your visitors will stay longer.

No. Unlike many other traditional CDNs, CloudFlare is zero configuration. What this means is that there is no configuration once you sign up for CloudFlare. CloudFlare's technology will automatically cache the static content based on file extensions.

Absolutely. There are two setup options.

Option 1:If you want to use both CloudFlare and your current CDN, in your CloudFlare DNS Settings page, you want to make sure that the CNAME for the CDN subdomain is listed and that the cloud is orange. This means that the traffic passes through CloudFlare first, before hitting your other CDN. As a result, your bill for your other CDN provider should decrease.

Option 2:If you don't want to use CloudFlare on the same subdomains as your other CDN, you can turn CloudFlare 'off' for those subdomains by marking the cloud as gray. This means that none of the traffic to those subdomains will pass through CloudFlare's network.

To access your CloudFlare DNS Settings page:

My Websites->Settings->DNS settings

CloudFlare is a complementary offering to popular WordPress caching plugins. Where as most WordPress caching plugins focus on optimizing your database and server, CloudFlare optimizes at the network level. CloudFlare has partnered with the popular W3 Total Cache plugin and is included as an option in W3 TotalCache (W3TC).

On the topic of WordPress, CloudFlare has a WordPress plugin as well. This ensures that WordPress users get the most out of the service. Note: If you activate CloudFlare through W3TC, then you do not need to use the CloudFlare WordPress plugin as well.

CloudFlare caches common static content file extensions, including JavaScript, CSS and images. The full list of what CloudFlare caches can be found here.

CloudFlare does not currently cache these content types.

No, dynamic updates to your site will still occur as they do now. CloudFlare is fully compatible.

If you plan on changing the static content on your site, like an image, we recommend going to Development Mode on your CloudFlare Settings page. Development Mode will bypass CloudFlare's cache and so any change that you make will be immediately live around the world. Development Mode is turned on and off with one click.

If you forget to enable Development Mode before making the change, you can simply purge your CloudFlare cache.

It takes less than one minute to purge your cache and by doing this, your new resources will automatically be live around the world.

If you don't want to purge your CloudFlare cache, then CloudFlare's cache will automatically expire after two to four hours.

Directions for getting to your Development Mode and Purge Cache settings: My websites->Settings->CloudFlare Settings.

CloudFlare believes that all websites should be fast. Because of CloudFlare's technology, we've been able to build a CDN that is available to any website online. From the beginning, we worked to minimize the costs of serving every byte. Wherever possible, we use our own custom-built systems that are designed for this purpose. We buy our bandwidth through the wholesale market, which means we're paying for the size of our pipe, not for each byte we serve through it. We also peer with other networks wherever possible in order to drive the cost of bandwidth as close to zero as possible. In addition to a Free service, CloudFlare offers additional paid plans and services.

Sign up today to get all of the benefits of CloudFlare's free CDN.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5641360814/ "CloudFlare Recent IPs API blog post by dbillian, on Flickr")

Many of our customers love CloudFlare's statistics report because the information available differs from other services providing analytics.

One frequent request is that customers would like to be able to look at the individual IP hits coming to their site. This information can be useful if you see a sudden increase in traffic and want more insight into the origin. Ian Pye, CloudFlare's API and reporting guru, created a solution in the CloudFlare API.

1. Open Firefox and install the Firefox JSONview addon. We recommend doing the API call in Firefox with the JSONview addon since the data output is easy to read.

2. Get your API key from your CloudFlare account.

3. Get your zone id by clicking on the 'Reports and Stats' option for the domain you want to pull data for. The zone ID is at the end of the url on that page (zid=xxxx).

4. The API values from the Client Interface API are as follows:

   [a] = zone_ips

   [tkn] = Your API Key

   [email] = abc@example.com (use the one associated with your CloudFlare account)

   [zid] = ID of the zone you would like to check.

   [hours] = Number of hours to go back. Default is 24, max is 48.

   [class] = (Optional) Restrict the result set to a given class. Currently r|s|t, for regular, crawler, threat respectively. If you omit this token you will see the results for all visitors.

   [geo] = (Optional) Include to add longitude and latitude information to the response. 0,0 means no data.

The URL is:https://www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html

​5. So, you are now ready to run the query. Open your Firefox browser, and run the following function, but insert the data from steps 1 through 3 for your particular site:https://www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html?a=zone_ips&tkn=InsertYourAPIKey&email=abc@example.com&zid=1228&hours=36&geo

The variables listed in blue are the ones that you should customize for your particular site.

​6. The data output will list the IPs in order from the most number of hits in the selected time period to the least. You will also be able to see the visitor classified by type.

One thing to note is that for Free accounts, you will only be able to see data older than 24 hours. For Pro accounts, you can see data in thelast 24 hours as well.

In terms of what you can do with the data, if you see a lot of requests coming a certain IP in a short period of time, you may determine it is an attack. In that case, you should add it to your Block List in your CloudFlare Threat Control panel. By adding the IP to the Block List, the visitor will be stopped from accessing your server reducing your server load.

Have any suggestions for improving the API? Have something cool that you've done with the CloudFlare API that you would like to share with the rest of the community? We'd love to hear about it. Share it with us.

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5617253313/ "CloudFlare Ninja killing spam by dbillian, on Flickr")

CloudFlare loves threat data. CloudFlare's sytem continually gets smarter through a variety of ways, including through user-reported data. So for example, users can add IP and IP ranges to their Block List. This information is fed back to the CloudFlare system benefiting the entire community. Recently, we also made some enhancements to our API that makes it even easier for CloudFlare users to feed reports of spam back to CloudFlare.

If you run are running your website on WordPress, you can easily share spam data with CloudFlare.

1. If you don't have the CloudFlare plugin installed, you will first need to install the CloudFlare WordPress plugin to get the spam reporting benefits.

2. After you install the plugin, please go to the sidebar in WordPress for 'Plugins' and click on CloudFlare.

3. You will need to enter in the CloudFlare API key and your CloudFlare account email address in the fields at the bottom of the configuration page. You can find your CloudFlare API key on your account page.

4. After you've configured the plugin, you will be able to report spam back to CloudFlare for comments that are found under 'All' or 'Pending' comments. If you want to select only one comment as spam, click on the 'spam' option and this will report the data back to CloudFlare. If you want to do a bulk report of spam comments, you can also use the bulk selector to mark the items as spam like you do now.

Note: You will not be able to report spam that is already marked as spam.

If you're not using WordPress, or if you want to report spam a little differently, you can use our Client Interface API to report spam back to us.

To interface with the CloudFlare Client Interface API you will need:

• Your API Key (which is available on your account page)

• Your account's email address

• The root domain name for a website under your account

You may interface with the API via HTTPS POST or GET requests to www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html. Unencrypted HTTP requests are not supported. Responses are returned in a JSON format.

The API call to send spam to CloudFlare:

$value = array("a" =\> $comment-\>comment\_author,"am" =\> $comment-\>comment\_author\_email,"ip" =\> $comment-\>comment\_author\_IP,"con" =\> substr($comment-\>comment\_content, 0, 100));$url = "/ajax/external-event.html?evnt\_v=" .urlencode(json\_encode($value)) . "&u=$cloudflare\_api\_email&tkn=$cloudflare\_api\_key&evnt\_t=";

send to www.cloudflare.com, port 443;

This threat data is used to make CloudFlare smarter and benefits not only your website, but the entire community. Let us know if you have any suggestions for making it easier to feed threat data to us.

Thanks for making the web a better place!

A Drupal developer, Brian Stevenson, recently created a CloudFlare Drupal extension that will help Drupal site owners get the original visitor IP at the Drupal level. Some common FAQs about the CloudFlare Drupal Extension:

The extension restores the original visitor IP at the Drupal level. Before the extension was available, your logs would reflect CloudFlare's proxy IP addresses.

You can find the installation on the Drupal.org website.

You do not need to install the extension if you have already installed mod_cloudflare on your server. It is recommended that you install both if you need original visitor IP at both the Drupal and server level.

The extension has known compatibility with Drupal 6. Drupal 7 is still under development.

The Drupal extension does not have the same spam reporting capabilities or database optimization features found in the CloudFlare WordPress plugin. However, the Drupal plug-in will continue to develop to include additional features.

A CloudFlare customer wrote up a helpful guide to what they found to be best practices using Drupal with CloudFlare.

A shout out to Brian for bringing this extension to the CloudFlare and Drupal community. If you are interested in contributing to the Drupal extension, we'd love to hear from you. Send us a note.

CloudFlare is not affiliated with or endorsed byDrupal.

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5576915675/ "Metallica Logo by dbillian, on Flickr")

While I may be dating myself in this post, I've been a fan of Metallica since 1986. Like many other teenagers listening to music during my youth, I was largely listening to a lot of cheesy "hair bands" during High School (ummm...1980's) and didn't really appreciate the thrash metal bands that were around.

Then Metallica came along and blew my mind; their virtuosity, heavy (yet melodic) sound, and interesting timeshifts from their rhythm section opened me to a whole new world of rock music that changed what rock music would become. Other than perhaps the mighty Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I can think of no other heavy metal band that influenced so many of the bands of the past thirty years or so.

The first time I saw Metallica live was on their 'And Justice for All' tour, playing with the band Queensryche at the Cow Palace in 1988. Metallica and Queensryche were my two favorite bands, so it was a dream come true, and I even had the fortune of going backstage after the show. Rich and famous? Yes. Approachable and cool? Totally. It was definitely a highlight of my teenage years to meet the band members I had idolized.

The last time I saw Metallica was at a private show at the Fillmore in San Francisco, fifteen years later in 2003. While time is generally not kind to rock bands, Metallica was still as tight a band as they were when I first saw them live fifteen years earlier and rocked the house like few bands can.

Fast forward to 2011...

A few weeks ago, Metallica signed up for the CloudFlare service. I reached out to the network admin to find out why Metallica decided to use CloudFlare, and the response is below:

As Metallica's technical consultants and an existing user of CloudFlare, we didn't hesitate to recommend your service to not only add a layer of security to the Metallica website and message boards but also to help reduce the load on their servers. In addition, Metallica's worldwide fan base benefits from the distributed content to speed up load times in countries where their site would normally take longer to load. Once these benefits were explained to Metallica's web management, the decision was easy.

CloudFlare is super excited to have Metallica join us, and our goal is to make all of Metallica's fans happy by making the Metallica site as fast as Metallica's music.

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5490466550/ "CloudFlare Joomla by dbillian, on Flickr")The CloudFlare team takes a great deal of pride in listening to the feedback of our users. We're pleased to announce that we recently released a beta version of our CloudFlare Joomla extension that will help you get the most out of using Joomla and CloudFlare together.

The extension restores the original visitor IP to your server logs. Before the extension, your logs would reflect CloudFlare's proxy IP addresses. The Joomla extension will restore your logs so that all the originating IP information is preserved.

You do not need to install the extension if you have already installed mod_cloudflare on your server. It is recommended that you install both if you need them at both the Joomla and server level.

You can download the Joomla extension here.

You then need to make sure the module is enabled for (a) position 2, and (b) all pages.

The plugin is compatible with Joomla 1.5.2.

The Joomla extension does not have the spam reporting capabilities or database optimization features found in the CloudFlare WordPress plugin.

Definitely contact us! We'll use your feedback to improve the extension for the entire CloudFlare community.

Disclaimer:CloudFlare is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Joomla Project or Open Source Matters.

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5489885171/ "globe by dbillian, on Flickr")

CloudFlare, with the help of many of our community members, has recently added support for multiple languages on the CloudFlare challenge page.

In addition to English, we've added the following languages:

• Chinese

• Dutch

• French

• German

• Italian

• Portuguese

• Spanish

• Turkish

Languages we plan to release in the next two weeks:

• Czech

• Estonian

• Indonesian

• Malay

• Marathi

• Norwegian

• Ukrainian

• Urdu

The language displayed is based on the browser setting of your visitor. If the browser setting is from a language that we do not yet support, then the page defaults to English.

We will continually expand the number of languages we support. If you are proficient in a language not currently listed and want to help with translation, contact us. Please include the language in the subject line.

We know first hand that running a forum isn't easy. I've run Vbulletin forums in the past. In addition to managing the community, I had to contend with things like spam, malicious attacks and large floods of traffic on a daily basis.

Since CloudFlare offers a protection against forum spammers and attackers and helps your forum stay online even with traffic spikes, I wanted to share some CloudFlare best practices for forum owners.

Before you activate CloudFlare, we recommend that you make an announcement to your community. Some topics to include:

• You're going to be trying a service called CloudFlare to protect and speed up your forums, which should improve page loading times and sharply reduce the number of active spammers.

• Advise your members that they may get a challenge page before they are granted access to the site. Let them know that they can still access the forum by passing the captcha, and that they can send you a message through the challenge page to request allowlisting of their IP address. Only a small number of your forum members will see the challenge page, but it is always useful to let them know what to expect. (On a side note, the intermittent page is used to stop automated bots from accesing your site).

• Let the community members know that the challenge page will appear if there are indications that their machine is infected with a computer virus or malware. The best thing to do is to run an anti-virus scan on their machine as a precaution.

• Let your members know that sometimes there are false positives with the data, but it is most common when the visitor is coming from a shared network like an office, college network or coffee shop. What this means is that although their computer isn't infected, someone else on the same network does have an issue. Your community member should run an anti-virus scan as a precaution. If there is no virus or malware, then they can enter the CAPTCHA to access the forum. The data set will refine over time.

We recommend reviewing the the following Top Tips blog post:Top tips after joining CloudFlareWhy: The tips include solutions for getting original visitor IP, including mod_cloudflare which is for Apache, while also reviewing many key CloudFlare features and settings. If you're looking for other solutions beyond Apache, CloudFlare community members have created options for getting visitor IP for Vbulletin forums, PHPbb forums & other platforms.

Customizing your CloudFlare challenge pageWhy: You can customize the look of the challenge page to match your overall brand aesthetic and customize the text to match your writing style.

Using CloudFlare Threat ControlWhy: Challenged visitors may leave a message for you in your threat control panel requesting IP allowlisting. In addition, you can use the threat control panel to add known IPs, IP ranges, or countries that you want to either block from or trust accessing your forum.

How CloudFlare stops forum and blog spammersAre there any other forum platforms that you use in which we should know about? Please let us know in the comments. Also, if you've created a solution and want to share it back to the CloudFlare community, add it to our Wiki.

You can get to your CloudFlare Settings by going to:

Your Websites->Settings->CloudFlare Settings

Given that each domain you register on CloudFlare may have different uses or security needs, CloudFlare settings are available on a domain by domain basis.

CloudFlare lets you adjust the security setting for your website between High, Medium and Low. CloudFlare protects your website from malicious attacks by stopping the request before it reaches your server. Often these requests are from automated bots crawling your website looking for a vulnerability. Sometimes, the threat is a web surfer whose computer has been compromised with a virus or malware and the web surfer is unknowingly spreading viruses online. In these situations, the web surfer visiting a CloudFlare protected website is presented with a challenge page asking them to enter a CAPTCHA to prove they are human.

The challenge page also educates the visitor that their computer may be infected. This helps to clean up the number of infected computers online, ultimately making the web a better place. The security setting determines which visitors are challenged based on their associated threat score.

Note: Threat Level scores are based on a logarithmic scale, not category, so threat types like spammer and exploit attacker could have similar scores.

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5391625276/ "CloudFlare Captcha Page by dbillian, on Flickr")

Related to the ‘Security Settings', you can change the look and feel of your challenge pagethat is presented to your challenged visitors. Website owners can customize the colors on the page to match their website and the text that is displayed.

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](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5391020267/ "CloudFlare Development Mode by dbillian, on Flickr")

If you know that you have to make a number of changes to the cachable content on your site (images, CSS, javascript, etc.), we recommend going to ‘Development Mode' before making these changes. Going to ‘Development Mode' will bypass CloudFlare so any site changes to static files are reflected immediately.

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](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5391020249/ "CloudFlare Purge Cache by dbillian, on Flickr")

If you want to have CloudFlare fetch a new version of your site's cachable content, Purge Cache will expire all the cached resources that CloudFlare has in your domain's cache. Please note that doing so means that it will take several days for a new cache to build.

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](http://www.flickr.com/photos/damonbillian/5391020231/ "CloudFlare Google Analytics by dbillian, on Flickr")

CloudFlare can make sure that Google Analytics is appearing on all of your site's pages, which helps improve the accuracy of your analytics. Adding the Google Analytics' code will also make sure you're always working off of the most recent version.

CloudFlare Pro accounts have two additional options available on the settings' page, which are:

Advanced security is a WAF (Web Application Firewall) that helps further protect your site from malicious attacks. Similar to the Basic Security Level, you can change the strength of the protection to low or high.

[Note: The website preloader was discontinued in June 2014.] The website preloader is astronger caching option to help improve the page loading times for your most requested static resources for subsequent page loads. You would only want to turn this feature off if you didn't want javascript to run.

Also see: Top Tips after joining CloudFlare