# Accounts, zones, and profiles

Within the Cloudflare ecosystem, there are three organizing concepts that control where specific settings live: user profiles, accounts, and zones.

flowchart LR accTitle: Accounts contain zones and user profiles contain user settings subgraph Account subgraph Zone - example.com A[WAF] B[DNS] end subgraph Zone - example2.com C[Cache rules] D[Waiting Room] end Workers K[Account members] end subgraph User profile G[Email address] H[Language] I[Communication preferences] end

Each user has a profile that contains several settings, such as Communication preferences and Language preferences.

To access your profile, select the user icon and then **My Profile** from any page within the Cloudflare dashboard ↗.

An account refers to an organization account. Accounts contain one or more users and can contain one or more zones. A user can be part of one or more accounts.

There are also several account-level products - such as Workers, Pages, Security Center, and Bulk redirects - that can affect some or all zones contained within that account.

After you log in ↗ and select an account - but before you select a zone - the sidebar will list account-level products.

Accounts also have their own settings, including account billing profiles, account members, lists, and more.

When you log into the Cloudflare dashboard ↗, you can access all accounts where your user is a member.

To access account settings and account-level products from within a zone, use the **Account Home** option from the **Profile** dropdown.

You can also use the back button near the zone name.

Domains (or subdomains) that are added to Cloudflare become zones1, which have a direct impact on the security and performance of your website, application, or API. Use your zone to monitor security and performance, update configurations, and apply zone-level products and services.

Zone-level services - such as Load Balancers and Cache rules - only affect your website, application, or API for that zone and not other zones, even if they are contained within the same account.

When you log into the Cloudflare dashboard ↗ and choose an account, there will be a list of all zones within that account.

Once you are within a zone, items within the sidebar will be zone-related products.

If you need to change to another zone, use the forward arrow next to the zone name or by go back to the homepage of your account.

-
Similar to DNS zones ↗, but with additional capabilities. ↩