Umbra Hosting is proud to announce a partnership with CloudFlare, a web performance and security company. If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, their purpose is simple: they make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats.

Today, hundreds of thousands of websites—ranging from individual blogs to e-commerce sites to the websites of Fortune 500 companies to national governments—use CloudFlare to make their sites faster and more secure. CloudFlare powers more than 65 billion monthly page views. More than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined—and over 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through CloudFlare’s network.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CloudFlare runs in 23 data centers strategically located around the world. When you sign up for CloudFlare, they begin routing your traffic to the nearest data center.

As your traffic passes through the data centers, CloudFlare intelligently determines what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on the CloudFlare servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before they are checked to see if they have been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.

Web Security

CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about CloudFlare’s approach is that the system becomes more intelligent as more websites are added to the CloudFlare community. CloudFlare analyzes the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.

CloudFlare Railgun™

As a CloudFlare Optimized Partner, we are thrilled to offer the CloudFlare Railgun™ technology to all of our Shared and reseller customers for free. CloudFlare and Railgun can also be installed on managed VPS’s/dedicated servers. Railgun is CloudFlare’s latest performance optimization technology that gives you significant improvements in site load times.

Railgun ensures that the connection between our network and the CloudFlare network is as fast as possible. Railgun achieves a 99.6% compression ratio for previously uncacheable web objects by using techniques similar to those used in the compression of high-quality video.

Fast and Easy Installation via cPanel

We have fully integrated CloudFlare within cPanel. You can easily and quickly enable CloudFlare by clicking on the CloudFlare icon in cPanel. cPanel then makes the necessary changes to point your web server to the CloudFlare content delivery network. Summary statistics as well as various CloudFlare settings are available directly from within cPanel.

OK, I want it now!

CloudFlare and Railgun is being rolled out in phases. We’ll be notifying all shared and reseller customers when it becomes available on your server. For managed VPS/dedicated server customers, please open a support ticket to schedule the installation.

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