TechSoup is excited to be partnering with Cloudflare, a performance and security enhancing platform with a mission to "help build a better Internet." This means strengthening the core of the Internet to make it faster, more reliable, and more secure. It also means leveling the playing field so that small businesses, nonprofits, and huge corporations alike have access to a better Internet.
In the spirit of this goal, Cloudflare and TechSoup are teaming up to offer specific nonprofit plans. Together, we hope to make the Internet safer for organizations that are working to make the world better and better support the communities they serve.
The TechSoup Offering
Cloudflare provides a scalable and easy-to-use service that combines security, performance, and reliability for on-premises, cloud-based, SaaS, or hybrid network applications. It provides DDoS protection, mobile and image optimization, load balancing, and a whole host of other features designed to make your site reliable, fast, and safe. It is a complete solution, storing your network layer in the cloud and using datacenters all over the world to bolster your security and improve your website's performance. It's designed to be user-friendly and scalable, to suit even the smallest of nonprofits.
With the Pro Plan, you get unmetered mitigation of DDoS attacks, global content delivery, and a web application firewall. You also get access to the "polish" and "mirage" features, which make your site faster and more beautiful. This is a good option for organizations that process under an estimated $1,000 of financial transactions a month on their website and don’t process or control personally identifiable information via their website.
The Business Plan gives you all of that, plus prioritized support, accelerated delivery of dynamic content, PCI compliance, and a great selection of other innovative features.This is a good choice for organizations that process over an estimated $1,000 of financial transactions a month and may utilize membership or account management functions, like patient portals for healthcare organizations, on their website.
Cloudflare and TechSoup have teamed up to offer our nonprofits a great discount on the Pro and Business Cloudflare plans. Both of these plans also include limited usage of Argo Smart Routing and a dedicated SSL certificate.
Performance
By harnessing the great Cloudflare features, you can accelerate page and image loading on your site, making browsing a better experience for your visitors. Cloudflare uses global CDN caching (distributing datacenters and proxy servers across various geographic locations), minification, and compression, among plenty of other clever tweaks, to make your website's experience smooth and quick for visitors. There are also plenty of extra features designed to optimize your images and videos and ensure that mobile users have a great experience with your site.
Cloudflare addresses the primary trends we see in performance pressure: customers' high expectations, the rising business impact of mobile usage, and the quickening pace of global expansion. Its developers work hard to directly address these challenges. The huge number of datacenters ensures that your content is always close to your visitors. The setup process is quick and easy, and integrated security features make it user-friendly.
Security
Cloudflare's systems are primed and ready to protect your data and computer systems. As well as secure connections to Cloudflare's datacenters, you can enable rule sets and firewalls in order to prevent attack. If you do suffer from an attack, Cloudflare will mitigate it quickly and efficiently, with as little downtime as possible.
Enabling HTTPS helps to prevent data leaks and improve visitor trust, and DNSSEC guarantees that your visitors aren't directed to a malicious spoof of your site. Whatever your security concerns, Cloudflare has you covered with customizable settings and lightning-fast recovery in the event of an attack.
Once again, Cloudflare has its finger on the pulse when it comes to the security pressures its customers face. The scalable nature of the network means it is always ready to mitigate new attacks. Plus, it's no use having a pretty website if it's down for hours at a time recovering from malware attacks, so security comes first and is never sacrificed for performance. The utmost care is given to configuring your website just right, so that it works for you and avoids security vulnerabilities.
Argo Smart Routing
What GPS does for your journey — finding the best route, steering clear of congestion, avoiding dead ends — Argo Smart Routing does for the Internet. Argo, the "virtual backbone" for the modern Internet, optimizes routing decisions across the global web in real time. It identifies congestion, outages, and packet loss and finds the optimum route between visitor and content. As a result, it reduces connection timeouts, decreases latency, and sees 60 percent fewer cache misses.
Argo is designed as a central nervous system for the Internet. Its increasingly broad reach and high number of users make its routes more and more efficient. The Internet is inherently unreliable, but Argo aims to "rebuild the core of the Internet" using the data it collects from the millions of users who pass through its networks. In this way, it can strengthen the Internet, making it a better and more reliable tool for nonprofits and, most importantly, our communities.
Be Part of a Better Internet
If you can't get to something quick enough, what do you do? The answer, according to Cloudflare, is to move it closer. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light, which puts an upper limit on how quickly your content can hit the screens of your website visitors. So our friends at Cloudflare built out a network that spans 200 cities across more than 90 countries to bring the information closer to its users. It provides security, performance, and reliability services to more than 2.6 million customers and more than 26 million Internet properties.
With top-notch optimization, robust protection, and speedy recovery, Cloudflare can give you peace of mind while improving your user experience. Check it out in our marketplace today!
