Every site ALCO hosts sits behind Cloudflare Enterprise. Clients hear that in a proposal, nod, and later ask what it means. Fair question. Here is the plain answer.

Where it sits

Cloudflare is a network of servers in hundreds of cities. When your site is behind it, visitors do not connect to your server. They connect to the nearest Cloudflare location, and Cloudflare connects to your server on their behalf. Your server's real address is hidden.

That one arrangement is what makes everything else possible.

It makes the site fast

Most of a web page does not change from one visitor to the next. Images, styles, scripts, and often the page itself. Cloudflare keeps copies of those at the edge, close to the people reading. A visitor in Boise gets the page from a server near Boise. A visitor in London gets it from London. Your server in the middle is asked once instead of a thousand times.

The result is a site that loads in a blink on a phone, and a server that stays calm when a post goes viral.

Caching has one catch. A change you publish can take a few minutes to show while the edge refreshes its copy. We set those windows per site, short for news and longer for pages that rarely change, and we clear the cache by hand when a change cannot wait.

It absorbs attacks

A denial-of-service attack is a flood of fake traffic meant to knock a site offline. A small server cannot stand in front of one. Cloudflare's network can. The flood hits the edge, spread across the whole network, and your server never sees it.

Short of a flood, there is a constant drizzle. Bots probing for old plugins, scripts guessing passwords, scrapers copying content. Cloudflare's firewall drops the known-bad traffic before it reaches you and challenges the suspicious traffic. Your logs get quieter and your server does less work.

It hides your server

Because visitors only ever talk to Cloudflare, your server's address is not public. Attackers who want to go around the shield cannot find the door. Combined with a server firewall that only accepts connections from Cloudflare, the server is reachable one way, and that way is watched.

It handles the certificate

Every site needs an HTTPS certificate so the padlock shows and the connection is private. Cloudflare issues and renews the edge certificate, and we keep one on the server behind it so the whole path is encrypted. You never see an expiry warning.

It keeps the site up when the server is not

If your server goes down for maintenance or a fault, Cloudflare can keep serving the last good copy of your pages. Visitors see your site. You get a quiet window to fix the problem instead of a loud one.

What Enterprise adds

The free and business tiers of Cloudflare do a lot. The Enterprise tier is what we run for every hosted client, and the differences matter when something goes wrong:

  • A stronger firewall and bot management, tuned per site.
  • Priority routing, so your traffic takes the fast path on a busy day.
  • Longer logs, so when a client asks what happened at 3 a.m., we can answer.
  • A support line that picks up, for us, when we need them.

You do not buy this separately. It is part of ALCO hosting.

What it does not do

Cloudflare does not back up your site. It does not fix a bug in your code or a hole in a plugin. It does not make a slow database fast. It does not watch your server's disk fill up. Those are the hosting provider's job, and they are the difference between behind Cloudflare and managed. We will write about what managed hosting actually includes later this week.

How to tell if your current site has it

Look up your domain's DNS. If the name servers end in cloudflare.com, it is on Cloudflare. Whether anyone has turned the firewall on, tuned the cache or hidden the origin is a different question, and the one worth asking your provider.

If you want a site that has all of this from day one, see what we have built at https://alcohq.com/work and how we host it at https://alcohq.com/services/managed-hosting