I view Cloudflare as the “Outer Perimeter” of my digital infrastructure. It is not merely a DNS provider. It is the first line of defence against the chaos of the open internet. I architect every site to sit behind Cloudflare’s proxy to leverage its global Anycast network.

This setup allows me to push content caching to the “Edge,” physically closer to the user, drastically reducing the load on the origin server. Beyond speed, I rely on its Web Application Firewall (WAF) to filter out malicious traffic patterns before they ever reach the WordPress installation. It handles SSL negotiation, DDoS mitigation, and bot fighting at the network level. For a System Thinker, Cloudflare is mandatory infrastructure. It turns a single server into a globally distributed, hardened network.