Why attacks come faster today
Attackers used to find vulnerabilities by hand or program their own bots for it. Today AI-driven systems do it automatically. They analyse huge volumes of data, find security gaps automatically and attack in a targeted way, around the clock and spread across the globe.
For anyone running a website this means the attack surface grows and the response time has to get shorter.
What Cloudflare stops
- Firewall The Web Application Firewall (WAF) checks traffic in real time, responds to new attack patterns and blocks automated attacks.
- Bot detection It also keeps bots away from the contact form, which is considerably better protected as a result.
- DDoS protection These attacks try to bring a website down with a flood of traffic. Cloudflare detects and blocks them, and the site stays reachable.
- Email addresses Addresses on the website stay visible to visitors, but spam bots cannot read them. No plugin is needed for this.
Faster and less vulnerable
Cloudflare caches content. Your site loads faster as a result, on smartphones and tablets too, and the hosting server carries less load.
SSL certificate included
Your website is delivered over HTTPS automatically. You do not have to set up or renew a certificate of your own.
When the host goes down
Cloudflare then shows a cached version of your website. Visitors can still reach it.
And data protection?
Cloudflare is headquartered in the USA, and data is partly processed outside Europe. As a web agency we would prefer Swiss or European providers. At present, however, none offers the same standard of security and speed.
According to its own information, Cloudflare meets the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the revised Swiss Data Protection Act (revDSG). It refers to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and an updated Data Processing Addendum. It is used by Ricardo, 20min and Zuerich.com, among others, and for parts of the websites of admin.ch, SBB and Swiss Post.
Besides data protection there are other drawbacks. In our view they do not rule out Cloudflare, but they should be weighed consciously.
The data protection questions deserve to be taken seriously. In our view the advantages still clearly outweigh them.
