If you have read our guide on how to choose the best WordPress hosting, then you probably know that Bluehost is one of our recommended WordPress hosting providers. But it’s not just us. They are officially recommended by WordPress as well. Recently while browsing through Facebook, we saw the status that Bluehost now has free built-in integration with Cloudflare. Check out the video below:
So what is Cloudflare? Well, it is a service that protects and accelerate your website. Once you integrate your website with Cloudflare, then your traffic routed through their global network. You get to use their CDN. If you don’t know what a CDN does, then check out our infographic. You get to use their security service as well as their analytics.
Why aren’t other web hosting companies integrating with Cloudflare? Well technically Cloudflare works with all websites. You have to do the setup yourself. But for beginners, the setup part can be tedious. Bluehost being one of the best companies decided to add free integration. We are sure that other hosting companies will follow.
Looking for a WordPress hosting provider? Then we highly recommend you check out Bluehost. They are definitely one of the best. That’s why both WPBeginner and WordPress recommends them. Don’t believe us? Check out Bluehost user reviews.
Some problems with Bluehost/CloudFlare. Need to add www. to the beginning of URL. Subdomains get lost. My subdomain “doesn’t exist” for the last 3 days now. “Free” CloudFlare offers support – but only after all paid support tickets are handled, so you can be in the queue for several days according to my one experience. Trying to get totally out from under CloudFlare.
On http://www.bluehost.com/cloudflare it says it has “some features for free” “some for pay” but then it only lists a pay price. Is this available for free or not? Since bluehost limits their bandwidth at 1.8 Mb/s per account, this might be worth something…
The free version is definitely available for everyone. If you want the additional paid features, then you have to pay for it.
The only issue here is none of .co.uk sites can be activated via bluehost. All .co.uk sites need to change hosting to be able to be included into cludflare otherqise via bluehost it is not possible to subscribe to this fantastic service.
What is best Maxcdn or Cloudflare.
We have been using MaxCDN way before Cloudflare.
One thing that puts me off to sign with them is that they don’t show you the final figure for the purchase and when you click PAY you see you’ve been charged some tax or something…it did happened to me.
Well, they refunded the money but why take the trouble and spend time writing to customer support?
This sounds like a great deal. But why is it being offered for free? Is this just an introductory offer — or are there caveats about signing up that we should know about?
Michael, CloudFlare offers this free service just because they have about 22M in funding. This is definitely a freemium model. They acquire the user for free. Hope that you like their service and want to upgrade to their premium plan. You can see the comparison in plans here:
https://www.cloudflare.com/plans
So technically, you can just use the free plan forever. But if you want more features, then you can move up. Since CloudFlare is free, Bluehost decided to make it super easy to integrate with for their users. Since CloudFlare wants a huge userbase, this partnership helps them as well because they were offering the free service anyways. So it’s a win-win-win situation. Win for you, win for Bluehost, and win for Cloudflare.
Hope that explanation helps.