Following on on the theme of defending against bot scraping, a common solution to this is to use Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a US based company that has, over the last decade or so, become a cornerstone of the modern Internet, dealing in content delivery and DDOS mitigation. In recent years it has expanded its services to include among other things, AI and bot scraping protection. With a generous free tier it can be an important tool in defending a website against not just attacks, but what is now the cost of running an online business.

Cloudflare’s setup process is designed to be as frictionless as possible. You need to migrate your domain to Cloudflare’s DNS service by configuring it to use their nameservers, after which web traffic is proxied through Cloudflare’s global network to take advantage of their tools. Your control panel provides a lot of information on how to deal with what might affecting your site and how to deal with it.

As a solution against emergency situations, it is an effective one. It made the once expensive requirements of DDOS protection affordable and over time has added more of the kind of services that work better in the network rather than on your server. However, this is of course at a cost. Their Pro service is $25 a month or $240 a year, and services have been progressively moved from the free tier to Pro. For high volume customers with a lot of devices the cost increases tenfold with a related increase in access to resources.

All so far so good, it’s a business doing what a business should do. However, potential customers should be aware of a few things:

• Like a lot of large scale businesses, they are prone to occasional large scale failures, which have the capability of rendering a large part of the commercial Internet inoperable, which last happened in November 2025.

• Despite having a global presence, Cloudflare is a US company. While it hasn’t openly supported the current US government, it is subject to US law, and data it retains is processed in the US.

• Cloudflare acts as a man in the middle for HTTPS. That means in normal use, and unless you are paying them for it, your website will use an SSL certificate that they issue. If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, traffic between Cloudflare and your website can be intercepted, and there is evidence that Cloudflare do that themselves – hardly surprising in a data driven economy.

• In the past Cloudflare has been slow to deplatform sites that advocate extreme views.

Cloudflare can be an effective tool in defending against unwanted bot traffic as well as the other services it provides. Moortech has been using Cloudflare in various ways almost since the service was launched so we can help you to include it in your mitigation strategy, an unfortunate necessity when doing business online at the moment. Contact us to find out how you can make the most out of it.