New Service: CloudFlare Pro (WAF, Compression)

It was only a few days ago that LittleBizzy announced WP StageCoach, and we are already back announcing another new service! We are proud to introduce CloudFlare Pro, another new partnership service that we are now offering, beginning immediately. CloudFlare Pro is now included in every single one of our Enterprise hosting plans free of charge, so if you are already signed up on that plan, your domain has already had this service activated within the last 24 hours!

Most of our clients and other followers are well aware of our love for everything CloudFlare. Since the very beginning, our team has insisted on requiring all LittleBizzy customers to route their DNS via CloudFlare’s top-of-the-line Anycast TCP nameservers. We’ve been vocal about defending them on the TTFB controversy as well, and have long enjoyed mocking all of their many haters (mostly college kids with too much time on their hands) while the rest of the internet — and companies the world over (including terrorist organizations) — continue to make the switch to CloudFlare not only for DNS resolution purposes, but also for website acceleration and security reasons too (often FREE of charge).

As we’ve taken on more and more high traffic sites, however, it’s become clear that we needed a more robust firewall in place, or at least available, to our managed hosting clients. In addition, the exponential growth of mobile traffic has left many of our clients frustrated as they attempt to play around with various WordPress plugins that claim to optimize and/or intuitively compress JPEG and PNG images for mobile devices on slower connections, despite such janky plugins having little to no effect (and often crashing WordPress… cough, TinyPNG for WordPress).

CloudFlare Pro simultaneously addresses both of these issues. Not only does the extremely affordable service bring a tremendous “boost” to your WordPress website’s security by blocking common XSS, SQL, DDOS, PHP, WordPress, and other threats at the DNS level (before they can even arrive at your server), but it also compresses PNG and JPEG images on-the-fly and delivers a compressed version (35% lighter on average) to visitors that still looks exactly the same as the original. This means that without any plugins, tinkering, or manual work, your website is much better optimized for mobile users and is also much more protected from attacks (this type of advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) would have cost thousands of dollars and would have required an entire maintenance team just a few short years ago.. truly amazing).

Last but not least, CloudFlare Pro also includes session optimization, which means that as users move through your dynamic WordPress site, CloudFlare is optimizing their server session based on past traffic patterns.

But who really needs this service? Frankly, any site would benefit tremendously from CloudFlare Pro. But if your traffic is not high enough to warrant our Enterprise plan, we’d still highly encourage you to consider ordering it, especially if your website is image heavy, slow for mobile users, deals with high value eCommerce, or is simply “worth” the best firewall protection and image optimization currently on the market. And not only that, but since LittleBizzy sells the service for only $10/month, it’s literally half the cost of ordering it directly from CloudFlare.com :)