Cloudflare sits between your visitors and your site. Every request for your pages passes through its network first, and that one hop buys you three things: speed, protection, and the padlock.
It is the same infrastructure used by a large share of the internet, and the tier every site we build uses costs nothing. You should know what you are getting, because a line about hosting shows up in proposals at every price point.
Every Signal site ships on Cloudflare's free plan with DNS, caching, and HTTPS configured before launch. You never pay us a hosting fee for it.
Speed: caching at the edge
Cloudflare keeps copies of your pages on servers in cities all over the world. A visitor in Detroit loads from a nearby server instead of one across the country.
The result is simple: your site loads in under a second on a phone, which is what Google measures and what customers notice.
Safety: the padlock and the filtering
The padlock in the browser bar is HTTPS, powered by a Cloudflare certificate that renews itself automatically. No expiring certificate emails, no broken padlock weeks after launch.
Cloudflare also filters obvious attack traffic before it reaches your site. Bots hammering your forms and scanners probing for weaknesses mostly never arrive.
Uptime: what happens when something breaks
If the server that holds your site hiccups, Cloudflare can keep serving cached pages so visitors still see your site instead of an error page.
That is why a broken site rarely means an unreachable one on a properly configured setup. It usually means content is stale, not down.
What it costs
The plan every site we build uses is free. Paid tiers exist for enterprise features most local businesses will never need.
You pay for the domain, roughly 10 to 20 dollars a year to the registrar in your name, and nothing to us for hosting on standard builds.
Quick answers.
Is Cloudflare really free?
The tier your site uses is free forever. Paid tiers add enterprise features a local business does not need.
Do I own the Cloudflare account?
Yes. Everything is set up in accounts you control, with your domain registered in your name.
Does it slow anything down?
No. It is the opposite: caching at the edge is usually the single biggest speed win a site gets.
What if I already have hosting?
We migrate the DNS during launch. Your old provider can be retired or kept for email only.
Related notes.
Keep reading
Website security basics Why websites break Domain names, explained Keep reading: How Long Does A Website Take