AnotherAndrew Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 Does anyone have any experience with CloudFlare, or anything similar? Is it worth the 5 minute hassle to set up for a small site that doesn't get much traffic? When do you think it would be worth it? General thoughts? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryan Posted March 3, 2012 Share Posted March 3, 2012 This looks like an interesting service. While I'm not sure I understand where the value would be for a low traffic site, it seems like it would be a great way to equip a site to better handle traffic spikes and provide faster regional performance... especially for sites that deal with higher traffic. I like that entry level CDNs are getting to be commonplace and within reach of all of us. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apeisa Posted March 3, 2012 Share Posted March 3, 2012 I have seen that sometime ago, but didn't find good reasons enough to test it. Little ot, but how about New Relic, anyone have any experience? http://newrelic.com/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted March 3, 2012 Share Posted March 3, 2012 I like both of those. I'd seen Cloudflare a while back but never read enough to understand what the benefit was. Okay, so you can minify your JS and CSS yourself relatively easily enough, but one of the things Cloudflare seems to do is do it for you, as well as hosting all your JS, CSS and images in geographical areas closer to the end user. Whilst I agree there would be little point for most small sites, one site I have has over a hundred articles and most of them have screenshots with them. The new version of the site will also be a bit graphics-heavy in terms of the design. Therefore I can see the point there as you don't want a gallery to take a while to load and then have to wait ages from clicking on a thumbnail to seeing the larger version of the image. It does look like it could take some tweaking though so it doesn't cache things you don't want it to. New Relic also looks excellent for a different reason - if it works as per the video then it can help point out performance bottlenecks based on what content people are viewing most That certainly sounds excellent and takes a lot of the guesswork out of troubleshooting what can often be annoyingly hard to find issues. Kudos to both companies for providing a free version, though I can't immediately see what New Relic's free version offers. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeffS Posted June 1, 2012 Share Posted June 1, 2012 I have a site using it (cloudflare) and in the last 30 days It saved about 70% of my bandwidth normally used on my VPS (with most big files already S3) and it cut the load on the server by about 50%. I have articles that get picked up by other sites and spikes in traffic so that was another win. Another nice feature is it blocks the most of the scrapers that would hammer the server to steal the content. That site gets about 10k users a day and the speed has really picked up and lowered the response time considerably. So far very impressed. Saves me from upgrading the VPS and plus It was a freebie offering from hosting provider that site is on, so I jumped on it. I think they give it away free to get the analytics on the traffic. But that is a better deal for me than Google analytics getting it all since the user does not benefit from that, now do they (just "better targeted ads"). 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryan Posted June 1, 2012 Share Posted June 1, 2012 Thanks for your review! Sounds like a great endorsement for this service. I hope to get the opportunity to try it sometime. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jacmaes Posted June 8, 2012 Share Posted June 8, 2012 I second Jeff's opinion of CloudFlare. I've been using the free version for a couple of months on 3 different websites, and the bandwidth saving + speed improvements do make a difference. Threat protection is a nice bonus too, and seems to work really well according to the statistics they provide. The $20-a-month pro version is tempting as it adds SSL encryption and two brand-new server-side image optimization services: what they call Mirage and Polish. Polish "applies 'lossless' or 'lossy' image optimization to reduce your image sizes by 35% on average". That's nice, but a program like ImageOptim does the same thing: http://imageoptim.com/ What really looks amazing is Mirage which "automatically resizes images for optimal display based on the screen size of your visitors' device." I haven't tried since I'm on a free plan, but that kind of server-side automatic resizing looks like the perfect solution to optimize loading time on mobile / responsive sites. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bernhard Posted April 13, 2016 Share Posted April 13, 2016 hi guys, bringing up a very old topic here... i wonder why the only 2 topics on cloudflare are this one here and that one: https://processwire.com/talk/topic/8324-thanks-for-procache-and-aiom/ the free plan sounds great for many projects. has anyone of you ever experienced any drawbacks? it seems to me that PW + ProCache + Cloudflare (including free SSL) should be a really easy and good setup? looking forward to hearing your opinions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
netcarver Posted April 13, 2016 Share Posted April 13, 2016 Bookmarking: How to setup cloudflare on non www. domains here, as this may come in useful for someone. I haven't tried this out yet, but may soon as my hosting provider only allows cloudflare support on www. domains - something that I'm moving away from. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveP Posted April 14, 2016 Share Posted April 14, 2016 If you have control over your nameservers, it's a complete non-issue. You just configure CloudFlare to point to your hosting, and point your nameservers at CloudFlare. For historical reasons (ie I didn't know any better) all my own domains are with Godaddy, while my hosting is elsewhere (currently vidahost, who have been excellent in the couple of years I have used them and before that nearlyfreespeach), and CloudFlare sits between them nicely. Even with the free account you get end to end encryption (CF accepts a self-signed cert for traffic from your server to them and provides a free cert for traffic from them to the browser), HTTP2/SPDY, minification, automatic injection of GA scripts, email obfuscation, CDN features and a whole slew of other stuff, even on the free account. Feel free to visit my blog which uses CloudFlare (link in sig) and have a sniff around. There's at least one post on there specifically about using CF with PW sites. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
netcarver Posted April 14, 2016 Share Posted April 14, 2016 Thanks DaveP! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apeisa Posted April 14, 2016 Share Posted April 14, 2016 Last summer we hosted big event website (also very heavy site with lots of big images, videos, embeds ets), that got well over 300 000 visits during weekend. We prepared for that with combination of ProCache + Cloudflare and we didn't get any reports of performance or availability problems (first time ever said the event organizer and it was also first time Avoine hosting the site). We were using the paid plan of Cloudflare though. It saved tons of servers from our side (just like ProCache did also). 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Karich Posted April 14, 2016 Share Posted April 14, 2016 CloudFlare helps us additionally in the defense against DDoS attacks. We have a few projects of customers who like to be the focus of attackers and often attempt to paralyze the servers. With CloudFlare, we have this blocked quickly. The service blocks the attacks, but leaves the real visitors through. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter Knight Posted April 14, 2016 Share Posted April 14, 2016 CloudFlare helps us additionally in the defense against DDoS attacks. We have a few projects of customers who like to be the focus of attackers and often attempt to paralyze the servers. With CloudFlare, we have this blocked quickly. The service blocks the attacks, but leaves the real visitors through. How does that work, David? I presume they monitor HTTP requests and block multiple attempts from the same IP? One of my hosts recently suffered a DDoS and now when I visit their site they utilise a "we're checking the legitimacy of your connection" or similar. This is a false positive and also creates a negative impression IMHO. Does Cloudflare work silently in the background or does it let you know it's screening your connection? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveP Posted April 14, 2016 Share Posted April 14, 2016 https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/ 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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