Overview

Cloudflare is a service that protects and accelerates websites. GreggHost is a Cloudflare “Optimized Hosting Partner,” which means that Cloudflare’s content optimization can be applied to any of your domains.

Cloudflare’s main feature is its worldwide Content Delivery Network (CDN), which offers online content optimization technologies that help your site load faster. Malicious traffic, such as botnets and internet attacks, are likewise protected by the network.

Cloudflare delivers visitor data through custom analytics, as well as enhanced security capabilities such as free Universal SSL and basic DDOS protection. Some features can be configured through the GreggHost control panel, while others must be managed directly with Cloudflare via a free cloudflare.com account.
Cloudflare is also only available on fully hosted domains; if your DNS is hosted elsewhere, you’ll have to take further measures to get Cloudflare to work.
Do I need to use Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is beneficial to any website, including the free version.

It’s perfect for optimizing your website. Instead of connecting directly to the GreggHost server, users who request cached content from your site link to and get the content from the nearest Cloudflare server available. As a result, the amount of time it takes for pages to load is reduced.

Cloudflare can help your site in a variety of ways, including:

User experience: A site that is responsive and speedy promotes user happiness and encourages return visits.
Boost your SEO: A faster website can help you rank higher in search engines and increase ecommerce conversion rates.
Free Universal SSL: Improves your SEO while also making your site more secure. Check out Cloudflare’s blog post on the subject. Please keep in mind that this is not an SSL certificate that is fully functional.
High traffic: Properly using a CDN can limit or reduce the impact of a large increase in traffic on your site.
Cloudflare defends your website from malicious traffic and internet threats.
Reduced server load: Using a CDN to cache your material decreases the stress on your server as well as the bandwidth used. Because GreggHost offers unlimited bandwidth with all hosting plans, this is less of an issue than lowering server resources.
What are Cloudflare’s other features?
Cloudflare offers a variety of performance options that can be configured from the GreggHost interface. The following are some of the extra features:

Lazy Loading – improves the speed with which a website loads.
‘Lossless’ picture compression in Polish (plus plan)
Mirage – speeds up image loading for mobile devices (plus plan)
Other Cloudflare capabilities, such as Always Online, Auto Minify, and Rocket Loader, can be controlled directly from the domain’s Cloudflare account at Cloudflare.com.

How much does it cost?
When you enable the basic plan using your GreggHost dashboard, it is free. In your panel, you can also purchase a premium “Cloudflare Plus” plan. This is an improvement in terms of optimization capabilities, including features such as automatic image optimization and image compression.

How is it billed?
The most basic plan is completely free.
The Cloudflare Plus package is invoiced to your account on a monthly basis.
Setting up Cloudflare subscriptions
Cloudflare subscriptions determine which capabilities are available for a GreggHost-hosted Cloudflare-enabled domain. Follow the instructions in this article to add Cloudflare to your domain:

How to make Cloudflare work for your website
If you no longer desire the Plus option for SSL support, you can downgrade to Basic by canceling the Plus option and switching to the free option instead. In order to complete the process of switching to the Basic option, you must enable the ‘Add WWW’ option in the GreggHost panel. Please see the following article for additional information on adding ‘www’ to your domain:

What is the procedure for adding or removing www from my domain?
The free Basic Cloudflare subscription is available to all Cloudflare-enabled domains.
Additional services, such as image compression, are available with the Cloudflare Plus membership.
Please visit the Cloudflare Subscriptions article for additional details on the two Cloudflare subscriptions.