Cloudflare

Cloudflare sits in front of a domain and does three jobs: DNS, a cache and proxy in front of your origin, and a place to run small programs at the edge. Most people meet it as free DNS. It is much more than that, but the DNS is the part that changed how I work.

How I use it

Every domain I register ends up with Cloudflare nameservers within an hour. The reason is speed: a record changes and the world sees it in seconds, which matters when you are moving a site between hosts or standing up a landing page for a test and do not want to wait. The free plan also puts a cache and TLS in front of whatever is behind the domain, so a cheap server looks fast and is harder to knock over.

Workers are the second use. A few small pieces of logic, a redirect rule that depends on the country, a tiny endpoint that stamps a request and passes it on, run there instead of on a server I have to keep alive. The free tier covers a hundred thousand requests a day, which for a small edge function is effectively unlimited.

What surprised me is Tunnels: a machine behind a home router can serve a hostname without any port forwarding. What annoys me is the dashboard. It has become a city, and settings I used last month have moved to a new district. The proxy also hides the real client IP from your origin until you read the forwarded header, which bites everyone exactly once.

Who it is for

Anyone with a domain. Honestly, there is no reason to leave DNS at a registrar when this is free and faster. The paid plans matter when you need image optimisation, longer cache rules or a WAF with custom rules, which for a personal site or a small product you do not. Skip the paid tiers unless something specific is missing; the free plan is the product for most people.