Free Cloudflare services (DNS, Security)

Cloudflare is one of the great provider for services such as DNS, CDN, and many security related services, and they’ve even ventured into more on the application side. Most importantly, they have free tier that you can play around with.

I’ve been using Cloudflare for a number of years, on their free services. I started off with their DNS service, which I make use of their DNS service to protect my services. They provide reasonable level of protection even for paid service, including DDoS, filtering etc.

• Zero trust – give you secure access to your self-hosted services without having to open up any ports
• WAF, CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, TLS/SSL
• Get your new domain or renew your domain with them without the ridiculous markup that you usually see from other providers
• Application side: database, serverless
• Alternative to google captcha, which I find it more efficient
• Email routing

To get started, go to Cloudflare website:

• Click on Sign Up on top right corner
  
• Fill in your username and password to signup
• Then go to your email and open the email from Cloudflare
• Click on the provided link to verify your email
• That’s it, now you can explore services provided by Cloudflare

What I’d recommend for beginner is to use their DNS service to protect your websites (or web applications)

Then you can venture into their captcha alternative (turnstile)

Their zero trust product is the next one after that

They have a bunch of great paid services too and it’s worthwhile paying for it if you need it. I see myself paying for it in the near future for what I’m doing, to improve security & protection.

I’ll write more about these products at a later date.