Fast WordPress Sites with Bluehost & Cloudflare Workers

WordPress is the most popular CMS (content management system) in the world, powering over a third of the top 10 million websites, according to W3Techs.

WordPress is an open source software project that many website service providers host for end customers to enable them to build WordPress sites and serve that content to visitors over the Internet.  For hosting providers, one of the opportunities and challenges is to host one version of WordPress on their infrastructure that is high performing for all their customers without modifying the WordPress code on a per customer basis.

Hosting providers are increasingly turning to Cloudflare’s Serverless Workers Platform to deliver high performance to their end customers by fixing performance issues at the edge while avoiding modifying code on an individual site basis.

One innovative WordPress hosting provider that Cloudflare has been working with to do this is Bluehost, a recommended web host by WordPress.org. In collaboration with Bluehost, Cloudflare’s Workers have been able to achieve a 40% performance improvement for those sites running Workers. Bluehost started with Cloudflare Workers code for Fast Google Fonts which in-lines the browser-specific font CSS and re-hosts the font files through the page origin. This removes the multiple Continue reading

Cloudflare Support for Azure Customers

Cloudflare seeks to help its end customers use whichever public and private clouds best suit their needs.  Towards that goal, we have been working to make sure our solutions work well with various public cloud providers including Microsoft’s Azure platform.

If you are an Azure customer, or thinking about becoming one, here are three ways we have made Cloudflare’s performance and security services work well with Azure.

1) The development of an Azure application for Cloudflare Argo Tunnel.

We are proud to announce an application for Cloudflare Argo Tunnel within the Azure marketplace. As a quick reminder, Argo Tunnel establishes an encrypted connection between the origin and the Cloudflare edge. The small tunnel daemon establishes outbound connections to the two nearest Cloudflare PoPs,  and the origin is only accessible via the tunnel between Cloudflare and origin.

Because these are outbound connections, there is likely no need to modify firewall rules, configure DNS records, etc.  You can even go so far as to block all IPs on the origin and allow traffic only to flow through the tunnel. You can learn more here. The only prerequisite for using Argo Tunnel is to have Argo enabled on your Cloudflare zone. You can Continue reading

Simple Helix chooses CloudFlare to ignite white-hot Magento performance

Today’s guest blogger is George Cagle. George is a system administrator at Simple Helix, a CloudFlare partner.

Some months ago, we made a big bet on partnering with CloudFlare for performance improvements and website security for our Magento hosting customers. Customer experience is core to our business and relying on another company is a major deal. CloudFlare is now included in Default–On mode for select Simple Helix hosting plans and can be added to any existing plan. The results have been great and we wanted to share a couple successes with the rest of the CloudFlare community.

Testing the waters

The first thing one notices after melding their site with the worldwide CloudFlare CDN network is just how fast a website becomes. In Simple Helix’s testing, we found that proper CloudFlare implementation can yield 100% speed increases, and an even faster 143% speed increase when paired with the Railgun™ web optimizer for dynamic content.

Adding CloudFlare will certainly improve performance, but it can also significantly improve security through the Web Application Firewall feature. The security benefits of having the CloudFlare service can be seen after just the first few days of adoption as outlined below:

 Total number of threats mitigated Continue reading

New Magento WAF Rule – RCE Vulnerability Protection

Today the Magento Security Team created a new ModSecurity rule and added it to our WAF rules to mitigate an important RCE (remote code execution) vulnerability in the Magento web e-commerce platform. Any customer using the WAF needs to click the ON button next to the “CloudFlare Magento” Group in the WAF Settings to enable protection immediately.

Both Magento version 1.9.1.0 CE and 1.14.1.0 EE are compromised by this vulnerability. CloudFlare WAF protection can help mitigate vulnerabilities like this, but it is vital that Magento users patch Magento immediately. Select and download the patch for SUPEE-5344.