I've heard many good things about them, but I'd say you don't need them as long as you don't have a well-visited site. (+500 visitors per day)
Never used them. Don't have any reason to. However, I have been working with a user on another forum and the results have been absolutely horrible. The page load times through CloudFlare are through the roof for me. I'm sure results vary, but I certainly wasn't impressed.
That's interesting, the stuff I've read so far has been very positive. Any chance you could point me towards the site running Cloudflare so I can take a look?
Since when? This forum is full of nothing but hearsay, and selfless promotion and affiliate links. Take a look around. The guy in the other thread was trying to figure out how you got 15,000 posts. Now I understand how; posting nonsense like that. Sure, I'll have to find the site. I was helping a guy out on another forum. Everyone was saying his site was ridiculously slow at loading. The minimum it would take me for his site to load was 20 seconds, and it went well over a minute...often times just timing out. We tried everything we could think of, and then he told me that he was using CloudFlare. I then accessed his site directly, and it loaded more or less instantly. Ping times were almost 20 times higher accessing the site directly, there were at least 3-4 times as many hops in the tracert (his server was in Europe, I'm in the US), and it was still 20 x's faster than using CloudFlare, which got to most of my test computers in 2-3 hops and 10-15ms. I used my home ISP, a friend's ISP, Verizon Mobile Broadband, and multiple servers in 3 different datacenters to run my tests. Funny thing is that I have worked with people on these issues several other times since. I thought it might have been a routing issue to California or the West Coast or so, but testing out of the other datacenters proved that one wrong. What I find really funny, is that Cloud Flare's main site doesn't even use their own CDN, rather the connections go straight to their main server. I wonder why? Sure makes it look like they're trying to hide something.
I actually work for CloudFlare & thought I would jump in. "What I find really funny, is that Cloud Flare's main site doesn't even use their own CDN, rather the connections go straight to their main server. I wonder why? Sure makes it look like they're trying to hide something. " We don't use the same DNS for the service as the main site because it prevents an issues from accessing the site if there is a DNS issue. "However, I have been working with a user on another forum and the results have been absolutely horrible. The page load times through CloudFlare are through the roof for me. I'm sure results vary, but I certainly wasn't impressed. " This would be highly unusual (most sites see a 40-60% improvement in page loading times). We wouldn't have sites like Metallica.com using us if we were slowing sites down on a regular basis. My guess: 1. The site had something at the host/server level blocking our requests (need to make sure this doesn't happen) 2. The site visitors were from an area where we don't have a datacenter in (Australia, for example). You can also see some strange issues with forums if you don't have mod_cloudflare (or equivalent) installed. " Ping times were almost 20 times higher accessing the site directly, there were at least 3-4 times as many hops in the tracert (his server was in Europe, I'm in the US), and it was still 20 x's faster than using CloudFlare, which got to most of my test computers in 2-3 hops and 10-15ms." A traceroute is actually much more valuable than a ping because it lets us a see which datacenter a person is hitting specifically.
While the nature of the CloudFlare network can help mitigate some attacks, I do need to advise that we're not a full DDoS solution & we will go direct if the attack is too large.
Hi can you explain the procedure to use it after payment? Do we simply just change the dns? need to install anything?
Damon, fair enough. I am simply stating my less-than-desirable run-ins I have had with your company. I have never used you guys personally, however. My only experience has been with a couple clients, and the folks from other forums. Some sites using your company (lowendbox, for example) do great, others (like the sites of my clients and the people I was helping out) were horrible. I don't really know what the difference is. Maybe the people I was helping were using your free service. I have no clue. Nope, checked this in every instance. There was no firewall blocking you, DDOS prevention software, etc. As I stated in my original post, I am in Los Angeles. You most definitely have a datacenter here. Used several different ISPs in Los Angeles, a bank of dedicated servers here, and dedicated servers in several other major locations, Dallas, and Chicago, mainly. Agreed. I ran hundreds if not thousands of tracerts between the different servers. The tracerts and ping times were all fine. There were generally 2-3 hops from the network to yours, but the pages still took forever to load. Not really sure what the issue was, but it was resolved in every instance by getting rid of the CDN and just serving the pages straight from the server.
Hi, I'm just providing basic things that can happen (impossible for me to check these cases based on your personal experiences). But I can say that it would he highly unusual for a site to have issues with performance, and it generally has to do with the factors I mentioned.
Yes, but I want to set a very reasonable expectation that we're not a DDoS protection service. If an attack gets too large & starts to affect other customers, we will go direct to your server.
CloudFlare is a free service. Yes, you change your DNS to point to our nameservers (nameservers are assigned when you create an account). No, no need to install anything to use CloudFlare.