What is Cloudflare ? How does it help webmasters ?

Just another couple of CloudFlare notes...

CloudFlare just opened our Miami datacenter, which will help speed up traffic for visitors in the SouthEast USA, Central & South America.
We're also looking for feedback out what we can do to get more users to use our IPv6 Gateway. Have any of your turned it on? Did you have any issues with the IPv6 Gateway?
 
Have you guys fixed the problem with people like myself not being able to tracert to CloudFlare sites? According to your techs, the fault is blamed on my ISP "messing" with my ICMP traffic. I don't have a problem with traceroute in Linux, but I was told that was because it uses UDP or something different from ICMP. I find it strange that my ISP is to blame for all the CloudFlare sites that I can't tracert to.

I had a lot of problems with weird connection errors and time outs using CloudFlare on my XenForo instance, even with the Page Rules turned on for the entire XenForo location. I was told to do a tracert every time I had problems, which obviously isn't even possible now for the last couple of months.
 
jgas said:
It's free, you get your site faster, and you get less spammers: where the deal with the devil? :D
I understood that you have to change the dns, and that's all, so all off you traffic is routed to the "filters" of cloudflare, but i can't understand why it is free...
Click to expand...

The short answer is that we operate off of a freemium model, so we hope people opt to upgrade to other features (based on their needs). We have a plan to always keep a free account.
 
SneakyDave said:
Have you guys fixed the problem with people like myself not being able to tracert to CloudFlare sites? According to your techs, the fault is blamed on my ISP "messing" with my ICMP traffic. I don't have a problem with traceroute in Linux, but I was told that was because it uses UDP or something different from ICMP. I find it strange that my ISP is to blame for all the CloudFlare sites that I can't tracert to.

I had a lot of problems with weird connection errors and time outs using CloudFlare on my XenForo instance, even with the Page Rules turned on for the entire XenForo location. I was told to do a tracert every time I had problems, which obviously isn't even possible now for the last couple of months.
Click to expand...

Seems kind of odd. What happens with CloudFlare off when you try to tracecert to a CF site?
 
I'm not sure what you mean by "with CloudFlare off". The only way to really "turn it off" is to revert the name servers.

When I used a page rule to essentially "turn off CloudFlare" to my xenforo installation, I still had the tracert problem. I know the page rule was in effect because the source of the page wasn't CF-itized.

I have the tracert problem to every CF directed site (including metallica.com) that support asked me to try to visit. A number of strange connection errors, most notably XenForo's "The server did not respond in time", were practically removed completely after moving from CloudFlare.
 
Hi,

" I'm not sure what you mean by "with CloudFlare off". The only way to really "turn it off" is to revert the name servers."

You can actually temp. deactivate CloudFlare in your settings by going to: settings->deactivate. We will still resolve the DNS...but we won't be proxying the domain when it is going direct.

""The server did not respond in time","
Generally speaking, this error isn't coming from us. This actually sounds like requests from CloudFlare IPs are being blocked at the server level or by the host.
 
The "the server did not respond in time" error wasn't consistent, and I've verified with my host support (Linode) that there are not any IP's blocked. I'm just relaying my experience with CloudFlare. When I had it on, I had a number of connection issues, including the inability to tracert to any CloudFlare site. According to CloudFlare support, none of these problems are a CloudFlare issue.

When I moved my XenForo installation off CloudFlare, those types of problems were significantly reduced, just from my personal browsing experience.
 
"When I had it on, I had a number of connection issues, including the inability to tracert to any CloudFlare site."

This does seem weird. Can't think of any reason that CloudFlare would impact this.

"The "the server did not respond in time" error wasn't consistent, and I've verified with my host support (Linode) that there are not any IP's blocked"
Did you have the XenForo mod installed? Curious. Every issue we check, outside of a rare system issue, does indicate that hosting providers do block/limit IPs. If someone is using CloudFlare, for example, we become a reverse proxy for sites & our IPs would show in requests to the site; without installing one of the mods to restore visitor IP, then somemay be blocking requests based on firewall rules.
 
damoncloudflare said:
Hi,

What are you basing the slowness on? A reporting tool? Need more details.
Click to expand...

Generally just 1st loading my site through my browser and that of user freed back to confirm it's not just me, which to me speaks values beyond any reporting tool.

But if you really want a "tool". The screen shot provided was using Firebug.
 

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damoncloudflare said:
If you are basing this on time to first byte, the issue is explained here.
Most sites see a 50% improvement in performance on CloudFlare.
Click to expand...

As a personal opinion and not an attack on your services.... I never logically accepted that argument.

Either the site loads faster completely or it doesn't. With Cloudflare it adds 7 - 10 seconds, compared to the 1 - 2 second load without it. It's really that simple.

But thank you for your reply.
 
damoncloudflare said:
Did you have the XenForo mod installed? Curious. Every issue we check, outside of a rare system issue, does indicate that hosting providers do block/limit IPs. If someone is using CloudFlare, for example, we become a reverse proxy for sites & our IPs would show in requests to the site; without installing one of the mods to restore visitor IP, then somemay be blocking requests based on firewall rules.
Click to expand...

I didn't know there was a mod, unless you mean the reassignment of the of the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable to $_SERVER['HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP']. I put that in my config to get the visitor's actual IP address.

I use nginx, and I didn't want to re-compile it just to get CF support, the REMOTE_ADDR fix was good enough for me.
 
I've Online Status Timeout set to 60 and normally the site shows that there are around 500 to 600 users interacting during an hour, but when CloudFlare is ON this number will drop near 200. Just wonder why that happens... any idea?
 
I use cloudflare,

I guess the service promise looks amazing, and I admit spam has been down dramatically.
Speed is nice too, as its cached around the world much like CND works. So when I reboot my server, the site will remain online (the appearance off), that's kinda cool.

But it has 2 super annoying side effect,

1) unless you want to spend each day on monitoring the traffic on cloudflare you will leave valid users out in the rain. they get challenged and can write a comment, but these are not send out, you only see this when you login

2) super annoying --> all your members will have the same IP address, cloudflares IP.
 

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