Used For

• +**Your hosting provider melts under traffic spikes** → Cloudflare absorbs the load automatically, your site stays up during viral moments
• +**Loading a 3MB image from your server in Ohio takes 8 seconds in Tokyo** → Edge caching serves it locally in 200ms, bandwidth costs drop 70%
• +**Bots are scraping your prices and hammering your server** → Built-in firewall blocks malicious traffic before it hits your actual server
• +Workers run code at the edge - deploy globally in seconds instead of managing servers in 20 regions
• +Zero Trust replaces your janky VPN setup with actual security policies that don't require port forwarding

Best For

• >Your site keeps crashing when it hits the front page of Reddit
• >International customers complaining your site loads like it's 2003
• >Spending more on server bills than your actual product development

Not For

• -Personal blogs with 50 visitors per month — you're adding complexity for zero benefit
• -Teams that need full control over their infrastructure — everything routes through Cloudflare's network
• -Anyone expecting instant results — DNS changes can take 24-48 hours and your site might be unreachable during the switch

Pairs With

• *WordPress (or whatever CMS you're running that needs the speed boost)
• *DigitalOcean (or AWS/Vercel — Cloudflare sits in front of whatever hosting you're already using)
• *Stripe (gets called from Workers for edge-computed checkout flows)
• *Google Analytics (to see if the performance gains actually translate to better user metrics)
• *Terraform (for teams that manage DNS and Workers configs as code instead of clicking around dashboards)
• *Shopify (e-commerce sites that need DDoS protection during flash sales)

The Catch

• !DNS propagation during setup can knock your site offline for hours, and testing is nearly impossible until it fully propagates
• !The free Web Application Firewall rules are pretty basic — you'll hit false positives that block legitimate users trying to submit forms
• !Workers debugging is painful with no local development environment, so you're deploying blind and hoping it works

Bottom Line

The free tier handles 90% of what most sites need, but good luck explaining to your boss why the site broke during DNS switchover.