CloudFlare provides integrations for several of the most popular hosting control panels and billing systems such as WHMCS, cPanel, and Plesk. Each of these integrations provide a simple interface for our partners’ customers to sign-up for CloudFlare and start adding domains almost immediately.

But what about partners that use more than one system? The best experience occurs when we can get our integrations talking to each other, as our recently updated WHMCS and cPanel plugins do.

All of our hosting integrations speak directly to CloudFlare through our host API. With just a single click, the integration passes the necessary information for CloudFlare to create an account and provision the domain. We respond when the provisioning completes, and the integration finishes the setup by making the necessary changes locally (adding and adjusting several DNS records) to route traffic to the domain through CloudFlare.

This makes signing up through a hosting partner integration even easier than signing up directly with CloudFlare. These proven systems make DNS changes accurately in order to save a lot of headaches.

Many hosting companies expose two different applications to their customers: a billing system and a hosting control panel. The former allows customers to manage their billing information and the products they have purchased; the latter is used to configure hosting products such as accessing files, managing DNS, adding email addresses, and setting up a database.

Hosting partners that use both WHMCS (billing) and cPanel (hosting), commonly ask, “Which integration should I use?” In the past, we have recommended the cPanel integration, because cPanel manages the DNS records for a domain. Domains added through cPanel can be set up in one click, whereas WHMCS required presenting instructions to the end-user on finishing the configuration.

WHMCS, as a billing system, handles auto-provisioning for a variety of hosting control panels, including cPanel. When configured, WHMCS will automatically set up new accounts in cPanel once the order is complete.

We join in this auto-provisioning, and immediately after CloudFlare is added, we send requests from WHMCS to the cPanel account to set up a CloudFlare account as well. The exact setup breaks down to a few easy steps:

1. Send a request from WHMCS to cPanel logging in as the cPanel user. This returns an access token for the user that we can use in subsequent requests to act as the user.

2. Send a second request with the access token simulating the action that a user would have performed if signing up through cPanel.

This action has the added benefit of not only setting the domain to run on CloudFlare, but it also sets up our cPanel plugin to show the domain as orange clouded and provides the options to manage many CloudFlare settings through cPanel.

Analogous to how CloudFlare stands between web servers and web visitors, we’re using cPanel between WHMCS and our API to make it easy for our partners’ customers to add CloudFlare to any new cPanel hosting account at the point of purchase!

(Note: only CNAME or partial setup added in WHMCS currently provisions through cPanel.)

The latest version of our WHMCS integration can be downloaded here. Installation requires a partner API key. New partners can apply at https://www.cloudflare.com/certified-partners.

For technical questions related to our integrations, please email us at partnersupport@cloudflare.com.

ServerShield makes it easy to activate CloudFlare and StopTheHacker

CloudFlare has partnered with Parallels, the leading hosting solutions provider, to make server protection, content acceleration and malware removal easier than ever. We recently launched CloudFlare ServerShield® to all Plesk 12 users as an extension. ServerShield combines the performance and security features of CloudFlare with the malware scanning and removal solution of StopTheHacker. Whether you are a hosting provider looking to offer additional services to your customers, or a Plesk server user, you can access ServerShield with two easy clicks.

Already, a number of hosters and agencies have found ServerShield a key addition to their tools to help their customer sites’ security and performance. Rafal Kukla a Company Director of FilioTech Limited, a UK based IT Service Provider, had this to say:

“ServerShield made it straightforward to give my customers industry leading security and performance as well as reputation monitoring. Running a busy agency, I am focused on my customers' site design, ServerShield allows me to do that without sacrificing the fundamentals of site functionality. With one single click I can enable CloudFlare among all my customers instead of spending time configuring each site separately.”

We believe that this extension is incredibly timely for the Plesk user community. DDoS attacks, a major concern for site owners, continue to increase in virulence and frequency. Over the last 12 months, we have seen separate attacks of 300 Gbps and 400 Gbps targeted at CloudFlare customers. In addition, studies show that security is among the top three web apps that SMBs seek from hosters (source: Parallels SMB Insights 2014).

As DDoS attacks increase, it’s your valuable time and resource that is spent responding to customers under attack. In the past, you’ve probably had to go through the painful task of nullifying the customer’s IP address, leaving the customer with their site offline. With ServerShield, the attack is stopped in its tracks at the edge before it even reaches the site. Web hosters can even switch on ServerShield by default, meaning no panicked calls from customers in the first place. ServerShield addresses another major customer support headache as well—malware. Estimates suggest that as many as 15% of sites are infected with this nuisance. ServerShield not only blocks these attacks, providing a dashboard to show customers how many threats have been prevented, it also provides means to trigger an automatic malware clean-up of infected accounts.

ServerShield comes pre-installed in all Plesk12 servers, and is available in English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian. If you would like to make your customers sites more secure with ServerShield, getting set up is simple: go to the Plesk Control Panel Home Page, select the CloudFlare Apache Module, and click Install. After successfull installation, CloudFlare is added to “Links to Additional Services”. If you don’t see the CloudFlare Apache Module, we’ve made the extension package available on our resources page along with a handy setup guide.

If you have any questions or feedback, please contact us on plesk@cloudflare.com. We would love to hear from you!

Parallels makes it easier for service providers, like webhosts, to grow their business with service delivery software and a robust partner ecosystem. More than 9,000 service providers use Parallels to deliver thousands of applications and cloud services to 10 million small and medium businesses (SMBs) in 130 countries.

Today, we are excited to announce the CloudFlare and Parallels partnership. CloudFlare is available to all Parallels Plesk Panel 11 and 10.4 service providers through the APS catalog. It takes less than 5 minutes to install and comes in twoplans: CloudFlare Free and CloudFlare Performance Plus. We've made it super easy for all Parallels Service Providers to offer enterprise-grade performance and security to their customers. With just a few clicks, website owners can activate CloudFlare from their Parallels Panel.

Parallels Service Providers get many operational benefits; reduced server load, bandwidth savings, protection from DDoS attacks and an automatic IPv4/6 gateway. For the first time, we've also enabled every Parallels Service Provider to resell CloudFlare to their customers and generate revenue.

"The new CloudFlare Parallels Panel plugin allows for quick and easy deployment," said Gerado Altman, National Partner & Reseller Manager at Velocity Host. "We would love to keep CloudFlare as our own secret weapon but really the more users who are on the network the greater the power CloudFlare has to wield against malicious attacks and help all those who use their services."

Our goal at CloudFlare is to bring premium performance and security services to every website. Today, over 500,000 websites use CloudFlare, ranging from blogs to SMBs to ecommerce websites to governments to Fortune 500 companies. Through our partnership with Parallels, we will be able to deliver performance and security to even more websites around the world. We're thrilled to be working with the Parallels team.

If you are a Parallels Plesk Panel service provider, sign up for the program here: www.cloudflare.com/parallels

In addition to Parallels Panel, Parallels also offers Parallels Automation. We are finalizing our integration into the Parallels Automation software and expect to release it later this year.

If you host with a hosting provider that uses Parallels Plesk Panel and they haven't enabled CloudFlare yet, encourage them to check out the program.

CloudFlare is only available on Parallels Plesk Panel 10.4 and Parallels Plesk Panel 11. If you are using an earlier version of Parallels Plesk Panel, then CloudFlare is not available through this partnership.

Check out our live interview with Parallels Sr. Director/ISV and SaaS Alliance, Alex Danyluk at HostingCon 2012 as he discusses our new integration.

CloudFlare protects and accelerates web traffic. As a result, we initially only proxied traffic for the two main web ports: 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS). One of the top customer service questions we receive is: "Why did my control panel stop working after I signed up?" The answer is that most control panels run on a non-standard web port that we don't proxy. As a result, if you try and connect to cPanel-like control panels through CloudFlare then your traffic will get blocked. Not a great first experience.

The solution has always been to access the control panel via the IP address or a subdomain setup to route around CloudFlare's proxy. That works great, but it still requires an explanation and therefore increases the CloudFlare learning curve. We're always looking for ways to make CloudFlare easier. A few weeks ago we began supporting other standard ports used by web control panels. In addition to 80 and 443, the list of supported ports now includes:

• 2052

• 2053

• 2082

• 2083

• 2086

• 2087

• 2095

• 2096

• 8080

• 8443

• 8880

This covers most the web major control panels. While we will now proxy traffic through these ports, we won't cache static content or perform any performance or app transformations on requests/responses that flow through them. If you don't use these, we'll also soon provide a method to easily shut down these ports at the CloudFlare level.

Reading this you may wonder why we can't open ports like 20, 21, 22 and 23 to support protocols like FTP, SSH, Telnet, etc. Unfortunately, while this is an often-requested feature, the protocols don't support it. We know where to send traffic after it connects to CloudFlare's network based on a HOST header in web requests. Non-web protocols like the above don't include a HOST header. As a result, for these protocols we see the traffic connecting to our network and have no way to route it to the origin.

This means that you'll continue to need to SSH and FTP into your server using an IP address or a subdomain you mark as being CloudFlare disabled on your DNS manager (we setup "direct" by default, but you can change it for better security). While this may seem like an inconvenience, there is an upside. By not directly exposing your origin server to traffic over these ports, we add an additional layer of security.

We also monitor all the connections from SSH and other protocol scanners that regularly try to "dictionary attack" logins. We feed this data back into our system in order to better protect from attacks. In other words, while there may be a bit of a learning curve to using SSH or FTP after signing up for CloudFlare, having those protocols blocked by our network means the CloudFare system is always learning.