GRADAX Partners with Cloudflare for Enhanced Website Security

We are thrilled to announce that GRADAX is now an official Cloudflare partner. After months of evaluation, technical integration, and certification, we have embedded Cloudflare's enterprise-grade security and performance infrastructure directly into every hosting plan we offer. This is not an optional add-on or a premium tier upgrade — every website we host, from the smallest portfolio site to the largest e-commerce platform, now sits behind Cloudflare's global network.

This partnership represents a fundamental shift in how we think about website hosting. In the past, security and performance were separate concerns that required separate tools, separate budgets, and separate expertise. Clients had to decide between paying for a CDN, paying for DDoS protection, and paying for a web application firewall, often from three different vendors. With our Cloudflare integration, all of these capabilities are included by default. There is no configuration to manage, no separate dashboard to learn, and no additional invoice to process.

The decision to partner with Cloudflare was driven by a simple observation: the majority of website security incidents our clients experienced were preventable with the right infrastructure. Brute-force login attempts, DDoS attacks on small business websites, SQL injection probes, and bot traffic that inflated analytics and consumed server resources. Our website security infrastructure now stops all of these at the network edge, before malicious traffic ever reaches our servers. For our clients, this means peace of mind without complexity.

If you are an existing GRADAX hosting customer, you do not need to do anything. We have already migrated all active hosting accounts to route through Cloudflare's network. Your DNS records, SSL certificates, and domain configurations have been updated automatically. The only change you will notice is that your website loads faster and your security dashboard now shows Cloudflare threat analytics alongside our existing monitoring data.

For new customers, every hosting plan . Starter, Professional, Business, and Enterprise, now includes the full Cloudflare integration. This means enterprise-level DDoS protection, a web application firewall with managed rulesets, a global CDN with over 300 points of presence, automatic SSL certificate provisioning and renewal, and bot management that filters out malicious automated traffic. These features previously cost hundreds of euros per month when purchased directly from security vendors. Through our partnership, they are included at no extra cost.

We have also integrated Cloudflare's analytics and security reporting into our client dashboard. You can see real-time data on threats blocked, bandwidth saved by the CDN, cache hit ratios, and performance metrics across all your domains, all in one place. No need to log into a separate Cloudflare dashboard or manage a separate account. Everything is unified under your GRADAX account.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks are no longer just a concern for large corporations. In 2025, Cloudflare reported that attacks targeting small and medium businesses increased by 140% year over year. Attackers use automated tools that can target any website regardless of size, often as part of extortion schemes or competitive sabotage. A successful DDoS attack can take a small business website offline for hours or even days, resulting in lost revenue, damaged reputation, and frustrated customers.

Cloudflare's DDoS protection operates at the network edge, absorbing and filtering malicious traffic before it reaches our servers. Their network has a capacity of over 280 Tbps, orders of magnitude larger than even the most sophisticated attacks. When a DDoS attack targets one of our client's websites, Cloudflare's automated systems, integrated into our cloud server infrastructure, detect the anomalous traffic patterns within seconds and begin filtering malicious requests while continuing to serve legitimate visitors. In most cases, the website's performance is not affected at all during an attack.

We have already seen this protection in action. Within the first month of our Cloudflare integration, three of our client websites experienced DDoS attacks that would have previously caused significant downtime. In each case, Cloudflare absorbed the attack traffic, the largest peaked at 45 Gbps, and our clients never knew it happened until we notified them. Their websites remained online, their customers experienced no disruption, and the attack was mitigated without any manual intervention from our team.

A web application firewall, or WAF, inspects every HTTP request that reaches your website and blocks those that match known attack patterns. Cloudflare's WAF includes managed rulesets that are continuously updated by their security research team to protect against the latest vulnerabilities . SQL injection, cross-site scripting, remote code execution, file inclusion attacks, and dozens of other exploit categories. These rulesets are the same ones used to protect some of the largest websites on the internet, and they are now protecting every GRADAX-hosted site.

What makes Cloudflare's WAF particularly effective is its machine learning layer. Beyond static rule matching, the WAF uses behavioral analysis to identify and block zero-day attacks, exploits that have never been seen before and therefore do not match any existing rules. This adaptive protection is especially valuable for websites running content management systems like WordPress, which are frequent targets for automated exploit scanners. The WAF catches probes and injection attempts that traditional security plugins miss because it operates at the network layer, not the application layer.

For clients with specific security requirements — PCI compliance for e-commerce, HIPAA considerations for healthcare, or industry-specific regulations, we can configure custom WAF rules that enforce additional protections. These rules run on Cloudflare's edge network alongside the managed rulesets, providing layered security that addresses both general and industry-specific threats. Our security team manages these configurations as part of our standard hosting service, so clients can focus on running their businesses instead of managing firewall rules.

Cloudflare operates data centers in over 300 cities across more than 100 countries, making it one of the largest content delivery networks in the world. When a visitor in Tokyo loads your website hosted through GRADAX, they receive cached content from a Cloudflare data center in Tokyo, but not from our origin servers in Europe. This reduces latency from hundreds of milliseconds to single-digit milliseconds for static assets like images, stylesheets, JavaScript files, and fonts. The result is a noticeably faster website for every visitor, regardless of their geographic location.

The CDN does more than cache static files. Cloudflare's edge network also accelerates dynamic content through smart routing and connection optimization. When a request does need to reach our origin servers, for example, to load personalized content or process a form submission . Cloudflare routes that request through the fastest available path across their global network, often reducing round-trip times by 30-50% compared to a direct connection over the public internet.

For our clients, the CDN integration means significant bandwidth savings. Static assets served from Cloudflare's cache do not consume bandwidth on our origin servers, which translates directly to lower hosting costs and better performance under traffic spikes. During a product launch or marketing campaign, when a website might receive ten times its normal traffic, the CDN absorbs the vast majority of requests at the edge. Our origin servers handle only the dynamic requests, staying responsive even under extreme load.

Every GRADAX-hosted website now receives a free SSL certificate provisioned and managed by Cloudflare. These SSL certificates are automatically issued, installed, and renewed, but no manual intervention required, no expiration surprises, no downtime during certificate rotation. The certificates support modern TLS 1.3 encryption, which provides both stronger security and faster handshakes compared to older TLS versions. For visitors, this means the padlock icon in their browser and the confidence that their connection is encrypted end-to-end.

Beyond basic SSL, Cloudflare's edge security includes several advanced features that previously required specialized tools or expensive enterprise subscriptions. Always Online ensures that a cached version of your website remains accessible even if our origin servers experience temporary downtime. Email address obfuscation prevents spammers from scraping contact information from your pages. Hotlink protection stops other websites from embedding your images and consuming your bandwidth. Automatic HTTPS rewrites ensure that mixed content issues never break your site's security indicators.

We have also enabled Cloudflare's Bot Management across all hosting plans. This system uses machine learning and behavioral analysis to distinguish between legitimate visitors, good bots like search engine crawlers, and malicious bots that scrape content, stuff credentials, or probe for vulnerabilities. Malicious bot traffic is blocked at the edge, reducing server load and ensuring that your analytics data reflects real human visitors. For e-commerce clients in particular, this dramatically reduces the noise in conversion tracking and provides cleaner data for marketing decisions.

We want to be very clear about pricing: nothing has changed. If you are on our Starter plan at 29 euros per month, you still pay 29 euros per month, and you now get enterprise-grade DDoS protection, a global CDN, a web application firewall, automatic SSL, and bot management included. If you are on our Business or Enterprise plan, same thing. Every feature described in this article is included in every plan at every price point. There are no upsells, no hidden tiers, and no surprise invoices.

We can offer this because of the economics of partnership. Cloudflare's partner program provides us with volume pricing that makes it viable to include these features across our entire hosting portfolio. Rather than passing the cost through to individual clients, which would price small businesses out of enterprise-grade security, we absorb it as a standard cost of doing business. We believe that every website deserves professional security, not just the ones with enterprise budgets. This partnership makes that belief a reality.

If you are not yet a GRADAX hosting customer and you have been managing your own Cloudflare configuration, or worse, running without any CDN or DDoS protection at all, we invite you to explore our hosting plans. You get the full Cloudflare stack, managed by our infrastructure team, integrated into our support and monitoring systems, with none of the configuration overhead. Security should not be an afterthought or a premium add-on. With GRADAX and Cloudflare, it is the foundation that every website is built on. Contact our team to learn how our Cloudflare-powered hosting can protect your business.