Protect Your Website with Cloudflare's Free Plan

You have a site running on a server somewhere. It works. But right now, anyone who knows your IP address can hit it directly, bots can crawl it without limits, and you are relying on Let’s Encrypt renewals not breaking at 3 AM. Cloudflare’s free plan fixes all of this in about fifteen minutes. This post walks through the setup end to end: what Cloudflare actually does, how to put it in front of your site, and which free features are worth turning on. ...

March 10, 2026 · 7 min · 1459 words · Abhijit Mohanty

How DNS Works: A Records, AAAAs, CNAMEs, and NS — Explained from First Principles

Type abhijitmohanty.com into a browser and hit enter. About 50 milliseconds later, a server somewhere responds with HTML. That jump — from a human-readable name to a machine-reachable address — is DNS. It happens billions of times a day and almost nobody thinks about it. This post breaks down exactly how it works: the lookup chain, the record types, and how all the distributed pieces fit together. The Problem DNS Solves Computers talk to each other using IP addresses — numbers like 192.0.2.1 or 2001:db8::1. Humans are bad at remembering numbers. DNS (Domain Name System) is the phone book that maps names to numbers. ...

March 5, 2026 · 9 min · 1877 words · Abhijit Mohanty