Cloudflare uses a number of techniques to accelerate your website.  See the overview here.  There are numerous reports, see the image below.

The Basic Concept

There are 3 main streams of traffic to your site.  Visitors (you want this) , Bots (you want some of these), and hackers (you don't want these).  These 3 sources are entering at the same point hitting one location - your web server.  Unless you have some way of tracking all the new and latest threats and then protecting yourself you going to be very busy developing ways to protect yourself.  Can anyone really keep up with all the new spam bots being made to scan your site for holes and your email address?

Cloudflare covers all this.  They provide a CDN (content distribution network) - using servers in many countries.  They cache your site and distribute it.  Anyone in the hosting business knows that a website hosted in America is slow to visitors in South Africa.  The closer you are to the server the quicker the site.  A CDN shortens the route by putting servers near to you.  They protect your site from hackers.  How so?  Cloudflare is the gateway to your site.  Normally a visitor uses their browser or hacking software to go directly to your site.  With cloudflare all traffic is first parsed by them and then either fetched from your site or from the cloudflare cache.  This way any threats get stopped BEFORE they reach your site.

More Advanced

If you use javascript or CSS on your site (most people do) then cloudflare will speed this up too.  Javascripts are compressed and minified depending on the requirements of the users browser.  The same is done for CSS.

Setup is so simply.  The CPanel in your hosting account has a cloudflare button.  You are asked to sign up an account.  Once complete you are asked what domain you would like to use cloudflare with.  That's it.

Cloudflare is available with our Basic hosting package.  You can sign up for hosting here.  Choose Small Business and then Basic.