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I've just started using Cloudflare to provide a secure SSL conection for visitors to my Raspberry Pi server, and it seems to work very well, so I thought I'd share the process.

Setup Cloudflare
Firstly visit cloudflare.com & sign up for an account.

Then follow the easy guides to add your website, this will take a couple of minutes as Cloudflare will automatically scan your DNS records, and create the necessary Cloudflare settings. You will then be asked to select a free or paid plan (free is more than adequate for most users).Cloudflare will then ask you to change your 'domain' nameservers, to Cloudflare's nameservers, which is done by editing your domain registrar's settings, such as 1&1, GoDaddy, 123-Reg, etc.

There is no site downtime when you do this, and once this change becomes active, visitors to your domain name will be directed to Cloudflare's servers, who will then request the data from your server, so Cloudflare sits between you and your site visitors.

At this stage, you will be accessing your site as always via http, as it takes a day or so for Cloudflare to get you your free SSL certificate. Once it has been obtained (check it's status in the 'Crypto' tab) visitors can also access your site via https, and they should see the familiar green padlock showing in the browser confirming a secure connection.

Keeping the http access route open is probably not a good idea, but this can easily be changed by going to the 'Page Rules' tab, and create a rule to direct all http traffic to https, so for example, the URL pattern should be http://*mydomain.co.uk/* to capture both www and non-www visitors, and add the rule 'Always use https'.

Also you may find (as I did) that emoncms's javascript does not work well with Cloudflaire's 'Rocket-Loader' (see under the 'speed' tab), which is activated by default, so needs switching off, otherwise you may find it difficult to log in to emoncms.

Automatically update IP address
If your internet provider gives you a dynamically assigned IP address, which changes your public IP address frequently, you will need some process to update Cloudflair with your current IP address, so it knows where to find you.

There are many ways to do this, but I've found this well written script works very well and is easy to set up.

Once installed it can be run as a cron job or as I have done, via node-red using a quick and easy node-red flow (attached) to run it.

Summary
You will note that the only changes that are made to your Pi is running the script to update your Cloudflair account with your IP address, everything else is done 'in the cloud', so if you don't like it you only have to stop running the script and reset your domain nameservers.

There is however one issue with Cloudflare, in that it does not support websockets (yet), so you will not be able to access node-red via your https connection, and only via your local IP (localhost). However, that doesn't cause me any concern because I don't open up the node-red port for external access anyway.

Hope this is of interest

Paul