CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which uses caching and a giant network of servers all over the world to serve your web pages much faster. It is a very low-cost defence against traffic spikes, attacks and the best way to speed up the performance of your website to all your users. This creates a better user experience for your site visitors.
We will insist that some sites on shared servers and all websites on dedicated servers use CloudFlare. Clients need to pay CloudFlare for their service but the fees are very low. The set up is very simple, you need to open an account with CloudFlare and make a technical change to the settings used by the domain name for your website so that CloudFlare become the Domain Name Service (DNS) provider. You may need to ask your IT professional to assist you with this. Day-to-day, when you are administering the website, you may notice a few minutes delay between you publishing a change to a page and everyone seeing the new version.
Every website could benefit from this service but it is essential when there may be spikes (sudden increases in demand) on your website, for instance if the site might at any point receive a lot of publicity from newspapers, TV, go viral on social media, or if you unveil something at a well-publicised launch time or involve online events or 'drops' by famous artists. If you think any of these may happen, involve and prepare Artlogic with as much notice as you can or your site could become slow and create a bad user experience.
CloudFlare is a very widely used service in our industry and offers great performance enhancements to your website around the world. See CloudFlare.com