Cloudflare

A good way to decrease bandwidth and therefore monthly hosting costs for your site is to have your site go through Cloudflare - a global CDN system. When the traffic goes through a proxy like Cloudflare, it also makes your website faster.

Although there are many more providers out there, Cloudflare is probably one of the best.

Below are the steps you need to take to set up a free account with Cloudflare:

1. Go to Cloudflare.com  and create a free account and send us the login details.
2. We will configure the web portion of the DNS settings
3. You will either give us login to your current DNS provider (Godaddy, network solutions, etc) or you will need to input all additional DNS settings in Cloudflare
4. We will move DNS to Cloudflare
5. We will configure your site to push all media files through Cloudflare

Note: A new domain beginning with media.yourwebsite.com will need to be added to the site's settings. This domain should redirect to the primary domain.

Clearing Cache on Cloudflare

You may need to clear out some files from the Cloudflare servers. In the free version of Cloudflare, you can either purge the files individually or purge everything at once.

Click here to visit the caching application in the Cloudflare dashboard.

Please refrain from purging everything and just choose the individual files instead. As per Cloudflare, purging the entire cache means all resources in Cloudflare's cache are immediately invalidated and the subsequent request for each invalidated resource will go back to your origin server(s) in an attempt to revalidate the resource. If the resource can't be revalidated, the resource in Cloudflare's cache will be replaced with the newer version of the resource from your origin. If you have many assets and lots of traffic, those requests could result in a substantial increase in requests to your origin and slow down your website.

Under Purge Cache, select "Purge Individual Files"

Purging a single file from Cloudflare's cache immediately removes that resource from Cloudflare's cache and the subsequent requests for that resource will re-add that resource to the cache with the latest version served from the origin.

Note: Wildcards are not supported with single file purge at this time. So example.com/*.js will NOT work. You need to specify the exact, full path to the file, including the http://example.com/file.js or https://example.com/file.js -- those methods are distinct for cache purge purposes.