You can use Cloudflare in your Bluehost hosted domain for free. It is one of the free services provided by Bluehost.
Cloudflare acts as a proxy between your visitors and Bluehost servers by caching static content of your site, subsequently lowering the number of requests to Bluehost’s servers while allowing visitors to access your site. With Cloudflare, you will be able to leverage Cloudflare’s CDN with 23 data centers across the world and enjoy a faster loading website that is optimized and auto minified.
Table of Contents
Advantages of using Cloudflare
- Site Performance Improvement
- Bots and threat protection
- Spam comments protection
- Alerting Visitors of Infected Computers
- Offline Browsing Mode
- Lower CPU Usage
- New Site Stats
- Guaranteed backups – Bluehost offers daily backups but they are not guaranteed. You can, however, opt for Bluehost Codeguard which will cost you $5.95 for up to 10 domains
Limitations of the Cloudflare System
- Currently, requests must be directed to www.$domain instead of $domain (which means you may need to make some configuration changes).
Enabling Cloudflare
Follow this link to enable CloudFlare: https://my.bluehost.com/hosting/cloudflare
You’ll be asked the domains to optimize with Cloudflare.
Select the domains you want to activate the free CloudFlare.
You can also select the premium CloudFlare account which has the following additional features that the free account doesn’t
Bluehost CloudFlare Free Vs Paid
| Features | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Worldwide CDN (23 data centers) | Yes | Yes |
| Intelligent Threat Protection | Yes | Yes |
| Rocket Loader (Web Optimization) | Yes | Yes |
| Auto Minify | Yes | Yes |
| IPv6 Support | Yes | Yes |
| Adjustable Caching Level | Yes | Yes |
| Performance/Security Stats | Daily | Hourly |
| Page Specific Settings/Rules | 3 | 10 |
| SPDY (reduced latency) | Yes | |
| Mirage Image Resizing | Yes | |
| Mirage Lazy Loader | Yes | |
| Polish (Image Compression) | Yes | |
| SSL Support (HTTPS) | Yes | |
| SSL Optimization | Yes | |
| Automatic Mobile Optimization | Yes | |
| Priority Server Processing | Yes | |
| Railgun™ (speeds up delivery of non-cached pages) | Yes |
Bluehost Cloudflare SSL and DNS
If you sign up for the free CloudFlare plan on Bluehost’s cPanel, you won’t need to change DNS and your SSL will not be affected. However, if you signed up on Cloudflare directly, you’ll have to change the name servers to use Cloudflare
If you go for the premium plan, you’ll need to make changes to the settings to ensure your SSL certificate is still active
My name is Nate Reiner and I am the editor here at 10Webtools. I have 8 years of experience using 50+ different web tools ranging from podcast, web hosting, email marketing, and much more. I previously managed a team offering support services to a large conglomerate that utilized tens of software solutions. I now run this blog full-time and when I am not reviewing or testing software, I enjoy riding bikes and supporting my clients achieve internet success. You can reach me directly at [email protected]