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Recent post here: Why we are canceling our CloudFlare Pro account and leaving the service

Oh no: I was really cautious and did a bunch of research on Cloudflare last week.
1st Result = "No way"
Closer look == Most of the negative comments around the web were from ~6 months or more ago, and they seem to speed up a lot of websites, sometimes very dramatically.

Until just now my remaining doubts were primarily related to avoiding their javascript (re)compression and "false positives" (serving stale content at the wrong time) when using their "always online" feature.
Do you think many 'real-users' get blocked by their "warning page?"
Do you trust Cloudflare (especially related to up-time and speed), or have you had repeated issues?
Any other problems you have seen, and / or are you "in love with Cloudflare?"




[quote='seeker' pid='829199' dateline='1330517700']
Recent post here: Why we are canceling our CloudFlare Pro account and leaving the service

Oh no: I was really cautious and did a bunch of research on Cloudflare last week.
1st Result = "No way"
Closer look == Most of the negative comments around the web were from ~6 months or more ago, and they seem to speed up a lot of websites, sometimes very dramatically.

Until just now my remaining doubts were primarily related to avoiding their javascript (re)compression and "false positives" (serving stale content at the wrong time) when using their "always online" feature.
Do you think many 'real-users' get blocked by their "warning page?"
Do you trust Cloudflare (especially related to up-time and speed), or have you had repeated issues?
Any other problems you have seen, and / or are you "in love with Cludflare?"

There were a number of issues that person reported, some of which are indeed valid.

1. We did have a large DNS issue about a week ago that did cause issues (safeguards now in place).
2. There was an AJAX post/get issue that impacted a small number of users (about 15). They were part of that group, unfortunately, and we were just able to push a fix that appears to fix the problem for the small number of affected users.

"Do you think many 'real-users' get blocked by their "warning page?""
Very few users actually see a challenge page. Why certain visitors see a CloudFlare challenge page.

"Do you trust Cloudflare (especially related to up-time and speed), or have you had repeated issues?"
Even with the aforementioned DNS issue, our network uptime easily exceeds 99.99+%.

" avoiding their javascript (re)compression"
Auto Minify, if that is the reference, is a beta feature that can be turned off in a matter of seconds.

""always online""
This feature has a number of limitations. We are working on a better version so these limitations go away.

Stale content:
The general cause of this would be users making changes to static content and not enabling Development Mode first to bypass the cache. If you do not do this, then you might see stale content for a few hours until the cache refreshes (you can also purge your cache as an additional option).







I don't trust cloudflare. It didn't really speed up my board or anything, instead it blocked many real users, I was getting a lot of complaints of people (especially from Asia) not being able to access my website. When I changed something in a theme I needed to wait a light-year in order for changes to take effect. And to be honest, the "change your DNS" at first scared me a lot (it still does; Imagine asking Google to change their DNS, heehee).

It may has some positive things for some boards that are extremely slow. But for mine, it was a bit terrible..

This is MY point of view on the subject, I'm not expecting any analysis to that from anyone. Thank you in advance Smile
(2012-03-02, 03:17 AM)TheGarfield Wrote: [ -> ]I don't trust cloudflare. It didn't really speed up my board or anything, instead it blocked many real users, I was getting a lot of complaints of people (especially from Asia) not being able to access my website. When I changed something in a theme I needed to wait a light-year in order for changes to take effect. And to be honest, the "change your DNS" at first scared me a lot (it still does; Imagine asking Google to change their DNS, heehee).

It may has some positive things for some boards that are extremely slow. But for mine, it was a bit terrible..

This is MY point of view on the subject, I'm not expecting any analysis to that from anyone. Thank you in advance Smile

I added 3 more of my sites today to CF. I run it on MyBBCentral and SupportForums with little complaints and certainly many positives.

Their DNS imho is awesome and on some sites I only use their DNS service. You simply can't beat what they offer for free.

I don't see how they are untrustworthy. I'm sure some false positives occur but I'm also sure they are stopping threats and spam too.

I have not seen any site lose stats due to CF.
I saw the appboy.com article shortly after taking the time to move several test sites to Cloudflare. I think Cloudflare has had amazing growth and will be an interesting story to watch.

Some people have a dramatic improvement, so they are 'sold' and less likely to be concerned w/ possible negatives. Others like 'TheGarfield' are not likely to have a positive review of CF any time soon.

I'm open-minded and am glad to see Cloudflare making improvements.

(2012-03-01, 09:50 PM)damoncloudflare Wrote: [ -> ]....
...
""always online""
This feature has a number of limitations. We are working on a better version so these limitations go away.

Stale content:
The general cause of this would be users making changes to static content and not enabling Development Mode first to bypass the cache. If you do not do this, then you might see stale content for a few hours until the cache refreshes (you can also purge your cache as an additional option).

Hi, thanks for the time to answer.

Glad to hear upgrades are coming to the "always online" service.
My reference to "stale content" ((....and "false positives" (serving stale content at the wrong time) when using their "always online" feature.)), was related to the 'always online' incorrectly deciding the target site is off-line.

#
Development Mode: Would be nice to see and option for less than 3 hours. Smile

(2012-03-02, 03:53 AM)labrocca Wrote: [ -> ]I added 3 more of my sites today to CF. I run it on MyBBCentral and SupportForums with little complaints and certainly many positives.

Their DNS imho is awesome and on some sites I only use their DNS service. You simply can't beat what they offer for free....

Nice review labrocca.
How do you set it for "only use their DNS service?" I've been setting the security low (to keep real users from being blocked), and adjusting some of the cache settings.

You can use it as DNS only?
Just disable their service to use them DNS only. Go to DNS Settings and click the Orange clouds and you'll see the disable option. That will then bypass their proxy servers for all the stuff you might complain about like cache, captcha, or whatever. You're then using them DNS only but able to enable their service if you need it.

They are one of the fastest DNS services I've seen. I can make a change and within a minute it will be propagated. I set all the TTL to about 10 minutes anyways.

One of my favorite features with the free version is the geo location which enables you to easily block by country. Very handy to block china, russia, and many other problem nations.

They have great basic level security and caching and it's all FREE.

I'm super picky about control and options yet I find that the benefits far outweigh the negatives.

I also have 4 sites as PRO so they do get $35 a month from me. Ironically that's more than what I pay for my shared hosting and CDN combined. But it's worth it imho for the price but did I mention that you can use them for FREE too.

I think they offer great options to disable or enable certain features. So using them is imho a no-brainer. At some level everyone can use them even if just for DNS.

btw I predict a buyout to a major company like Google or even Amazon within 2 years.
I feel my site is faster without it, and I prefer to secure things myself. Using Cloudflare means another site to login to and check things, I like to do everything in one place (ssh).
"Glad to hear upgrades are coming to the "always online" service.
My reference to "stale content" ((....and "false positives" (serving stale content at the wrong time) when using their "always online" feature.)), was related to the 'always online' incorrectly deciding the target site is off-line."

Thanks for clarifying.
That is largely the result of what search engines have in cache (stale content), so that's why we're working on a better version of Always Online as well.

The site offline messages only occur when the server is actually down or something is blocking our requests (our ips need to be whitelisted). Full details here: http://www.cloudflare.com/wiki/I_keep_se...Offline%22
(2012-03-02, 03:17 AM)TheGarfield Wrote: [ -> ]I don't trust cloudflare. It didn't really speed up my board or anything, instead it blocked many real users, I was getting a lot of complaints of people (especially from Asia) not being able to access my website."

Were these users getting challenge pages? If so, there are actually a lot of spam bots and infected machines in Asia & that would explain why visitors would get challenged. You can, however, change your security level settings to a lower level & you also have the option of whitelisting by IP, IP block or Country in your threat control panel.


When I changed something in a theme I needed to wait a light-year in order for changes to take effect.
If you don't go to Development Mode first when making changes to the static content to your site, then there might be a slight delay until the cache updates. You can also purge your cache as another option.

And to be honest, the "change your DNS" at first scared me a lot (it still does; Imagine asking Google to change their DNS, heehee).
Understandable. That is how our service works (through DNS) so we can't always address this concern easily. We do offer CNAME pointing as a beta feature for users that don't want to change DNS...but they won't get the full CloudFlare functionality when doing so (the CNAME pointing can't proxy/cache A records, for example).

It may has some positive things for some boards that are extremely slow. But for mine, it was a bit terrible..

This is MY point of view on the subject, I'm not expecting any analysis to that from anyone. Thank you in advance Smile
Not providing an analysis. Just trying to highlight what the issues are from a product/feedback point of view.


(2012-03-02, 07:28 AM)labrocca Wrote: [ -> ]Just disable their service to use them DNS only. Go to DNS Settings and click the Orange clouds and you'll see the disable option. That will then bypass their proxy servers for all the stuff you might complain about like cache, captcha, or whatever. You're then using them DNS only but able to enable their service if you need it.

They are one of the fastest DNS services I've seen. I can make a change and within a minute it will be propagated. I set all the TTL to about 10 minutes anyways.

One of my favorite features with the free version is the geo location which enables you to easily block by country. Very handy to block china, russia, and many other problem nations.

They have great basic level security and caching and it's all FREE.

I'm super picky about control and options yet I find that the benefits far outweigh the negatives.

I also have 4 sites as PRO so they do get $35 a month from me. Ironically that's more than what I pay for my shared hosting and CDN combined. But it's worth it imho for the price but did I mention that you can use them for FREE too.

I think they offer great options to disable or enable certain features. So using them is imho a no-brainer. At some level everyone can use them even if just for DNS.

btw I predict a buyout to a major company like Google or even Amazon within 2 years.

"One of my favorite features with the free version is the geo location which enables you to easily block by country. Very handy to block china, russia, and many other problem nations."

Thanks for the support! I just wanted to clarify that our country block in threat control only challenges visitors right now (not a full block...human visitors can still enter the site passing the captcha).

Quote:Thanks for the support! I just wanted to clarify that our country block in threat control only challenges visitors right now (not a full block...human visitors can still enter the site passing the captcha).

Yeah I figured that out and I use htaccess which does block.

Quote:I feel my site is faster without it, and I prefer to secure things myself. Using Cloudflare means another site to login to and check things, I like to do everything in one place (ssh).

True but if you're on shared hosting the benefits work well imho to reduce load and bandwidth which your host might cap you with. And for larger sites the DNS is great for example I can easily add cnames via Cloudflare or add A records to new servers very quickly.

Running DNS yourself means you have a weak point in your serving. UDP floods are common. On HF for example I have UDP blocked at the router level preventing completely that type of attack. Very handy. Thanks in part to Cloudflare DNS HF is almost never down.
(2012-03-02, 11:45 PM)damoncloudflare Wrote: [ -> ]...
Thanks for clarifying.
That is largely the result of what search engines have in cache (stale content), so that's why we're working on a better version of Always Online as well....

Right, you serve from a copy of search engine cache. Hopefully the improved version will avoid going to the backup when the site is actually up.
Thanks
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