Cloudflare has designed its CDN without the legacy of the last 15 years. Our proprietary technology was built to continuously adapt and integrate emerging technologies to meet future needs of everyone’s Internet properties.

Newest and Most Efficient Hardware

Cloudflare has exclusively used SSDs from the beginning to significantly reduce power consumption while increasing read performance.

Setting Up Our Data Centers to Scale

Cloudflare deploys smaller footprints in more locations. This allows us to take advantage of innovative deployment, power, and cooling strategies. As a result, we have been able to optimize the processing of high volumes of traffic through our network.

By default, Cloudflare only caches static files. However, Page Rules can be utilized to set more files as cacheable. With Enterprise features like Query String Sort, Cloudflare will first sort the query strings in a URL into a deterministic order before checking cache for the resource or requesting it from the origin. This feature is especially useful for API servers, which often rely heavily on multiple query string arguments.

Cloudflare’s global Anycast network powers our DNS and other services. With Anycast, multiple machines can share the same IP address. When a request is sent to an Anycast IP address, routers will direct it to the machine on the network that is closest.

Anycast allows us to save significant network latency while creating an extremely resilient network. The nature of Cloudflare's Anycast network is that we inherently increase the surface area to absorb such an attack. A distributed botnet will have a portion of its denial of service traffic absorbed by each of our data centers.

With built-in load balancing and automatic failover, the Cloudflare network has been designed to withstand losing 50% of the network without impacting service availability. Customers who sign up for our Business or Enterprise plans also receive a 100% uptime SLA.

How Can Cloudflare Offer a Free Service?

Cloudflare believes that anything connected to the Internet 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. We never charge for bandwidth and are committed to always offering a FREE version of Cloudflare with at least today’s feature set. Cloudflare’s premium plans offer even better services at reasonable prices. We hope you love the service and choose to upgrade.