How can I enable Cloudflare?
Overview
Section titled “Overview”Cloudflare is a third-party service that offers a free tier of DDoS protection, prevents malicious bot and AI traffic from reaching your site, and provides additional control over your site’s DNS, metrics, statistics, and much more. Cloudflare is fully compatible with all hosting services offered by Hawk Host.
Why Use Cloudflare?
Section titled “Why Use Cloudflare?”Hawk Host customers frequently use the following Cloudflare features to protect their sites and improve performance:
- Under Attack Mode — Adds an interstitial challenge page to filter out malicious traffic during active attacks.
- AI/Bot Protection — Blocks unwanted AI crawlers and bots from consuming your server resources.
If your site is experiencing HTTP GET floods, network-level attacks, unwanted AI/bot traffic, or you simply wish to hide your site’s public DNS records, Cloudflare is a strong solution.
Setting Up Cloudflare
Section titled “Setting Up Cloudflare”You can connect your site to Cloudflare directly through the Cloudflare dashboard. Their onboarding process will walk you through all the necessary DNS changes. In most cases, the entire setup takes less than 30 minutes from signup to full protection.
The general steps are:
- Create a free account at dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up.
- Add your domain name to Cloudflare.
- Cloudflare will scan your existing DNS records and import them automatically.
- Update your domain’s nameservers at your registrar to the Cloudflare nameservers provided.
- Once nameserver propagation completes, your site will be protected by Cloudflare.