Your apps now run behind Cloudflare
We've moved Cloud Apps behind Cloudflare. Every app you deploy now gets an address served through Cloudflare's global network, and every custom domain you point at us runs the same way. You don't configure any of it — but it changes a few things worth knowing about, and it unlocks one thing worth doing.
Attacks stop at the edge
Requests to your app's address now arrive at Cloudflare first, across hundreds of edge locations, and only legitimate traffic is handed back to the machine your app runs on. Volumetric denial-of-service floods — the kind that used to be a small host's worst afternoon — are absorbed out at that edge before they reach us. There is nothing to switch on; it is simply how every app is served now.
Faster, wherever your visitors are
Cloudflare's network is anycast, so a visitor in Sydney and a visitor in Frankfurt each connect to a nearby edge rather than making the full round trip to the server on every request. The connection and its HTTPS handshake are terminated close to them, which takes a noticeable bite out of load times for anyone far from the machine.
Your own domain, with a single CNAME
Pointing your own domain at an app used to mean lining up DNS records and waiting on a certificate. Now it is one record.
Open your app in the panel, add your domain, and we show you a single CNAME to create at your DNS provider — pointed at cname.cnpods.com. Cloudflare validates it, issues the HTTPS certificate and starts proxying, usually within a few minutes. There are no TXT records to juggle and no certificate to manage or renew, and your domain runs behind exactly the same protection as everything else.
Your address stops depending on the server
Because Cloudflare sits in front, the address people use to reach your app is no longer tied to the specific machine it happens to run on. If we move an app to different hardware — a bigger host, or a different region — the address it answers on does not change. That is the piece that used to be genuinely hard, and it is now the default.
What you need to do
Nothing, if you are happy where you are. Apps already running keep working exactly as they are, and anything you deploy from here on gets the new Cloudflare-backed address automatically.
If you want your own domain on an app, that is the one thing worth doing: open the app, go to its domain settings, add your domain, and create the single CNAME we give you. A few minutes later it is live, on HTTPS, behind Cloudflare.