Why Cloudflare?
Every domain I own is either purchased on Cloudflare or routed through Cloudflare. I’ve brought it into client setups as well — only a few of them aren’t utilizing the full extent of what the platform offers. With Exlink, I escalated through every available tier, from free to pro to business — as the project’s requirements grew. Even this website is hosted through their network.
How I Use It
Cloudflare isn’t just DNS for me. It’s the networking layer that ties everything together across KnausDev infrastructure and client projects.
What runs through Cloudflare
- DNS management: every domain I manage, personal and client, resolves through Cloudflare
- CDN: edge caching for static assets, Astro builds, and media files
- Tunnels: securely exposing self-hosted services from Proxmox and Hetzner without opening firewall ports
- Internal networks: private networking between services across locations
- App hosting: hosting static sites like this one directly on Cloudflare’s network via Pages
- SSL management: certificate provisioning, renewal, and termination. No manual Let’s Encrypt workflows
- Security: DDoS protection, WAF rules, and bot mitigation in front of Nginx
- Custom routing: traffic rules and redirects managed at the edge
- Load balancing: distributing traffic between zones for high-availability setups
- White-label setups: custom domains and SSL for multi-tenant Laravel applications where each tenant gets their own branded domain, a key part of KnausDev’s platform engineering work
Scaling with projects
The Exlink project is a good example of growing with Cloudflare — starting on the free tier and progressively moving through pro and business as the platform needed more advanced WAF rules, load balancing, and custom page rules. That progression is typical of how I approach Cloudflare: start lean, scale the tier when the project justifies it.
Status
Active: core networking and security layer for all KnausDev infrastructure.