Cloudflare is free and I still can't believe it

Listen. Diane runs the tax prep office I keep running, and in February her site got buried under junk traffic. Bots hammering the contact form all night. Her host wanted money for a firewall. I moved her DNS to Cloudflare instead, on the free plan, and the junk stopped hitting her site at all.

That was four tax seasons ago. I've never paid Cloudflare a dollar. Neither has Diane. Neither have the other five sites I keep.

Here's the thing people miss. The three parts that matter most to a small business website, the address book part (DNS), the padlock (SSL), and a wall in front of your site, are all free. The paid plans are for companies with actual problems. Yours probably aren't those.

What it is, what it costs

Cloudflare sits between your visitors and your website. Every request lands at Cloudflare first. Real visitors get passed through to your host. The junk gets filtered, and the free plan filters plenty.

Free gets you: DNS that updates fast, an SSL certificate that renews itself, a CDN that keeps copies of your pages close to your visitors, and unmetered DDoS protection. No traffic caps. No trial that expires.

The paid tiers exist if you want them. Pro is $20 a month billed annually, $25 monthly. Business is $200 a month billed annually. Those add finer bot filtering, image optimization, and a support desk with humans. Free plan support is community forums and documentation only. No number to call.

There's one more thing, and it's my favorite line item in this whole industry. Cloudflare sells domain names at cost. No markup. A dot-com starts around $7.85 a year and renews at cost, which is usually under twelve bucks. Most registrars charge $20 to $35 for the same name and raise it every year.

Setting it up on a client site

Make the free account and add your domain. Cloudflare reads your existing DNS records and copies them in.
It hands you two nameserver addresses. You change those at the place you bought the domain. That's the whole installation.
Wait. Propagation runs from a few minutes to a few hours. Diane's took about twenty minutes.
Turn the orange cloud on for your website records. That routes visitors through the filter. Leave the mail record grey. Proxy your mail record and your email breaks, and I know this because I broke it once.
Set SSL to Full in the dashboard. Done.

Cost of the whole setup: about an hour and zero dollars. Cost of the certificate renewal: zero, forever. It renews itself and you'll forget it exists, which is the point.

The water filter version

Cloudflare is a whole-house sediment filter. All the grit in the municipal line hits that cartridge first. Your fixtures, your valves, your water heater only ever see clean water. The cartridge takes the beating so your pipes don't.

Your host is the pipes. Without the filter, every bot, scraper, and attack lands directly on the machine you pay for, and it buckles when the junk spikes. With it, most of that never reaches your building. And the cartridge is somebody else's job to change.

The one wrinkle: cached pages. Cloudflare keeps copies, and sometimes it serves a copy after you've changed something. I updated a menu price on a client's site once and the old price sat there for a day. One click, Purge Everything, fixed. Confusing if you don't know it's coming.

When I'd actually pay

I'd pay Pro for a client selling photographs, because image optimization is worth real money on a portfolio. I'd pay Business for a store taking cards, mostly for the support desk and the uptime promise. Nobody I keep pays me enough to need either, and I won't recommend a plan I haven't run.

I did move two domains to Cloudflare Registrar, mine and Dr. Okafor's. Hers was renewing at $35 a year at the old registrar. Now it renews at cost, call it ten or eleven bucks. Small money. Small money every year, forever, adds up.

Support on the free plan is the honest weak spot. Forums only. I've had two real questions in four years and answered both myself in their documentation. I can live with that trade for free.

What to do Monday

Look up your domain's renewal price tonight. If it's over twenty bucks a year, start a free Cloudflare account and move the name to their registrar before it renews. Twenty minutes, one nameserver change, and you stop paying a markup on your own address.