CloudFlare

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CloudFlare is a free CDN (Content Delivery Network) available to everyone. There are around 50,000+ websites using CloudFlare (including SupportForums.)

Personally I think CloudFlare's CDN is a great service. I use it for most of my websites as the speed performance boost is great. It's easy to setup, and the web tracking stat's give me a fair idea of what's being used, and when.

On-top of the speed boost, it saves around 50% of my resources in terms of bandwidth & requests. I really couldn't ask for more.

CloudFlare also comes with some great extra features, a few of these include:
Basic Security; which can protect against small to medium UDP flood attacks (DDoS)
Advanced Security; protects against SQL injections / POST attacks
Auto Minify; for JS and CSS
The last one i'll mention is a Spam/Threat protection layer that requires flagged users to complete a Captcha screen before they can proceed to the website. A few users on SF have been experiencing 'inconveniences' with this feature.

I'm interested to see if anyone on here uses CloudFlare for their website(s)/services, and what are your views on it.

[DAMINK™]

Dont use it and dont like it.
Pisses me off just quietly having to fill in captchas.

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Dont use it and dont like it.
Pisses me off just quietly having to fill in captchas.

Fair enough. Have you tried changing your IP address? If you have, has this made any difference with the Captchas?

[DAMINK™]

Honestly recently i have not had any issues here with it.
Well the last few days anyway. But every now and again it comes up still.
I just find it to be a bandaid fix of sorts. Sure it claims to be good against things beyond spammers.
But i wonder. If a site was not being spammed then would they still run this?
Never personally used it on my sites. Never needed to so cant judge any more than from the user level.
And at the user level it stinks of smelly smelly stuff.


Additionally i think some people should check this site out.
http://amix.dk/blog/post/19627
First link i checked regarding reviews of the product.
Not a great review i have to say honestly.
To summerise what the above link says...

My conclusion

I stopped using CloudFlare after I observed degraded performance. Degraded performance is a huge setback for a service that claims to improve performance by 60%.

They are still a new service and I wish them good luck in the future. It could be I was unlucky and I will definitely try them out again if others report an observable performance gain by using them.

Currently thought, I think it's too much marketing speak, too many unknowns and too few real results. Like an old quote says:

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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Honestly recently i have not had any issues here with it.
Well the last few days anyway. But every now and again it comes up still.
I just find it to be a bandaid fix of sorts. Sure it claims to be good against things beyond spammers.
But i wonder. If a site was not being spammed then would they still run this?
Never personally used it on my sites. Never needed to so cant judge any more than from the user level.
And at the user level it stinks of smelly smelly stuff.


Additionally i think some people should check this site out.
http://amix.dk/blog/post/19627
First link i checked regarding reviews of the product.
Not a great review i have to say honestly.
To summerise what the above link says...

Strange how it comes or goes, I would have thought that you've either flagged or you're weren't, but it does seem to be a little sketchy about it's logic at times.
I did a Google search for pictures of the page and some of them say that the screen appears because of a certain word of phrase in the PM or POST, maybe that explains the erratic behaviour?
On the CloudFlare settings there is an option to turn the Captcha settings up or down, either to be more or less aggressive if needed. If you thought that this was a buggy feature of CloudFlare then you could set the filter on 'Low' or just disable it completely.

But i wonder. If a site was not being spammed then would they still run this?

Definitely! The reason I speak so highly of CloudFlare is because I run some pretty heavy duty software on my web server, one of the biggest being Magento eCommerce. With CloudFlares caching it takes the 4-6 second load times and brings them down to around 1-2, for this I believe that CloudFlare is priceless.

From a web master perspective it's great.

Never personally used it on my sites. Never needed to so cant judge any more than from the user level.
And at the user level it stinks of smelly smelly stuff.

I'd highly recommend you sign up a free account and give it a go, you've got nothing to lose and i'm sure that you will be pleasantly surprised with the speed boost. And as I said before, if the Captcha system is still giving you grief, it's easily disabled.

I'm not sure what to say to that review, other than it's a completely different experience than i've been having.

[DAMINK™]

No way would i ever put my small but loyal community through that mate.
Not a chance in hell.
http://www.supportforums.net/showthread.php?tid=23001
There is the thread i started related to this.
This forum is the only forum i have even encountered this with actually.
Not that i am active on very many forums now days. Under 10 i would say.
But this is the only one. I actually did not know what it was when i first saw it.
Although i tent to deal with vbulletin sites more than mybb.
Just nature of owning one. Never seen a thread on vb about this either i gotta say.

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No way would i ever put my small but loyal community through that mate.
Not a chance in hell.
http://www.supportforums.net/showthread.php?tid=23001
There is the thread i started related to this.
This forum is the only forum i have even encountered this with actually.
Not that i am active on very many forums now days. Under 10 i would say.
But this is the only one. I actually did not know what it was when i first saw it.
Although i tent to deal with vbulletin sites more than mybb.
Just nature of owning one. Never seen a thread on vb about this either i gotta say.

You could enable CloudFlare on a secondary or sub domain, e.g cdn.yourdomain.com to test it. Its a non-intrusive service, you shouldn't let your few bad experiences put you off giving it a fair trial yourself.

[DAMINK™]

Nope not a chance in hell mate.
I have no need for it and dont see a future need for it.
I have 0 spam problems and moderation is not something i actively do so there is literally 0 need for it.

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Nope not a chance in hell mate.
I have no need for it and dont see a future need for it.
I have 0 spam problems and moderation is not something i actively do so there is literally 0 need for it.

Well if your site starts to get a little more popular, CloudFlare will be the way to go. Not for spam protection, purely to decrease those load times.

I can see your viewpoint on the Captcha screen is set in stone, but the other services are definitely noteworthy.

[iRun]

Cloudflare did not speed up my site. It drastically slowed it down.