Cloudflare
What it is
The layer between a visitor and your website: traffic passes through it, and it can host the site outright; bucca.dk is hosted there.
What it’s good at
Speed by geography: copies of your pages sit near your visitors; Munich loads like Copenhagen. Absorbing the attack or launch-day spike that would flatten a single server. It is becoming the gate deciding whether AI crawlers may read your site at all, and that is a decision marketing is increasingly asked about.
What it costs to own
The settings are a real surface. A caching rule serving the old page after your launch. A redirect written in the dashboard, forgotten until it misfires. DNS that decides where mail goes as well as where the website is. Someone must know who holds the account and where the DNS is administered; that knowledge leaves with a departing developer, and you find out during an outage.
When it’s a poor fit
If the site runs on Shopify or Webflow, they handle speed and uptime themselves, and Cloudflare becomes a second layer with more settings to keep track of. If the pages are heavy, it helps less than one might hope; they are delivered faster, but they are still heavy. And it presumes that someone in the company knows the login, because this is where all the traffic passes through.
What it sits beside
For a site built as finished files it replaces hosting; for everything else it is a layer on hosting you already pay for. It runs beside GitHub, where the code lives; rules made in Cloudflare’s dashboard sit outside the code’s history, unreviewed.
My experience
bucca.dk runs on Cloudflare from domain to page, and what I get out of it is a site that loads fast wherever in the world it is opened.