Member Avatar for Dani

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with Cloudflare and what you thought of it? A LOT of big sites are using it, and from what I'm hearing, it's really good at caching entire webpages at the DNS server end without ever having to hit your web servers.

However, for just as many awesome stories I hear about it, I hear just as many nightmares. One site I frequent has been having constant outages since they switched with messages such as "The server is inaccessible so here is a Cloudflare cached copy of the page" when the server was having no issues at all. Another site is claiming that users from China and some other countries can no longer visit their site because Cloudflare has been blocked at the ISP level.

Any firsthand stories to share?

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Member Avatar for betatester

cloudflare infront, shared hosting behind, W3 total cache with CDN by AWS cloudfront

Member Avatar for Dani

How's it working for you? Have you run into any complaints or reliability issues?

Member Avatar for betatester

not yet. ran into a DDoS last night without any problems. only a minor issue. worked fine, but its only a minor site with very limited unique visitors.

Member Avatar for Dani

Oh okay. Is that why your signature says "don't bother me with a DDoS"? LOL

Member Avatar for betatester

exactly, plus i'm new here. the only issue I have run into with Cloudflare occurs on live edit sites, where users are constantly changing content w/o purging cache(s) on WP sites. I've actually added CF to a few sites without the user knowing to increase thier pagespeeds => SEOs. Little things to make the client happy.

Member Avatar for Dani

Yeah, every little bit of speed increase helps nowadays. I've had Cloudflare recommended to me a handful of times, but I'm really resistant because I'm seeing a lot of bug reports related to it as well, especially with false positives related to it's attack prevention and issues with foreign countries.

We don't use anything like that, but we do make heavy use of memcached, and in many cases we cache large portions of each page, so that reduces heavy load from our database server and also helps reduce the amount of processing necessary by PHP.

Edited by Dani because: Oops
Member Avatar for JorgeM

Aside from the reliability question, does this section included in their terms raise any concerns, regarding what I intrepret as adding their code to your content?

SECTION 7: YOUR CONTENT
...you acknowledge CloudFlare may:

Add script to your pages to, for example, add services, Apps, or perform additional performance tracking. Other changes to increase performance or security of your website. CloudFlare will make it clear whenever a feature will modify your content and, whenever possible, provide you a mechanism to allow you to disable the feature.
Edited by JorgeM
Member Avatar for Dani

From what I understand, that's a part of their service. For example, I can see them using that clause to provide static cloud hosting for static images, and dynamically modify the URLs within the HTML files to point to their new location. Just an idea?

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