What is Cloudflare ? How does it help webmasters ?

damoncloudflare said:
Hi Adam

Fixed. It was a corner case so took longer than usual to investigate. Sorry about the wait.
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Thank you.

I've finally run over a few test and all seems to be working. Sorry it took awhile to get back to you... Been busy download games on Steam and else where after switching to Windows 8 (oh noes).
 
KatieH said:
I've been using Cloudflare for a year so far and the moment i disable it/ paused it right now, i saw a traffic boost. Why is that :l I did realize my traffic dropped dramatically over the year after using Cloudflare but I was always told it is not Cloudflare, now i have verified this myself.

Yes i have all Cloudflare Ips white listed and I have mod_cloudflare installed on my server. And I also have the security setting on low and Browser integrity check off. I've done everything Cloudflare recommended. Anyone else experience traffic boost after disabling Cloudflare?
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The traffic boost you are seeing is all of the bots/malicious attacks/suspicious activity that Cloudflare normally filters out when it is active.

Quality over quantity.
 
KatieH said:
Even when i used cloudflare for the entire year, i still have to ban spam bots on daily basis, it didn't really protect against bots, either on high or low security and on high it is even worse because it can block many good members.
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Cloudflare doesn't block spam bots, it blocks crawlers and other scripts causing denial of service/looking for exploits/any number of other things.
 
KatieH said:
I think that is really bad now. I can see how this can have negative effects on something like Adsense.
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It doesn't block Google's crawlers or Adsense's scripts. The only way it would have a negative effect on Adsense is if you are doing something shady to begin with.
 
If you understood it I am sure you would feel differently. Most people don't have the technical knowledge to appreciate such a technology so they complain about trivial things like a drop in traffic when in actuality that is a good thing. I'm not saying that you don't, but the majority of people are not technically savvy enough to understand what Cloudflare is doing when you put your website behind it, so you can't really put much weight behind their complaints, as it comes from ignorance or naivety.
 
The only thing I know about CloudFlair is that I've seen it on some sites, when I expected to see the forum itself. All I could get to was some type of cloudflair spash page. I'm not interested in using it, that's for sure.
 
KatieH said:
Ok everything you just said now in your last post i did not said and it doesn't make sense because you didn't explain much. Calling people naive and ignorance, doesn't make you the smart one.
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I didn't call you naive or ignorant. I made it a point to say that I wasn't talking about you. I said that the Google results of people complaining cannot be taken seriously because most people have no idea what Cloudflare even does.
 
With several million websites on their network there is bound to be complaints. I can not recommend cloudflare enough, it has worked as a charm for more than a year, saved us days worth of downtime and probably thousands in expensive mitigation.
 
whyweprotest said:
With several million websites on their network there is bound to be complaints. I can not recommend cloudflare enough, it has worked as a charm for more than a year, saved us days worth of downtime and probably thousands in expensive mitigation.
Click to expand...

Yet...

Brandon Sheley said:
The only thing I know about CloudFlair is that I've seen it on some sites, when I expected to see the forum itself. All I could get to was some type of cloudflair spash page. I'm not interested in using it, that's for sure.
Click to expand...

...this is why I disabled it. We had numerous complaints about outages. Our account level at our host is such that we don't have to worry about bandwidth (we use about a third of our total allowance), and things are plenty fast with our new server hardware and SSD drives. I do miss having the malicious traffic blocked though. Even when I had it active, it did nothing for the loads on our old server. I saw very little benefit.
 
Then you might not have set it up correctly? I see HUGE performance gain when on CF. Then again my websites are all https only with spdy v2, and other snacks supported by CF.

We are also soon able to budget a business for our main website, which will remove that pesky time to first byte tradeoff we get when adding CF.

All in all, the only negative effect I get from CF is time to first byte, usually adding between 300 ms and 500 ms, BUT.. In most cases it removes that in download time to client, except when client is next door to the data center.

I have also tested several other CDNs, such as amazon, maxcdn and cdn77 and Cloudflare is easily the fastest and easiest to use.
 
Our CF was setup per their instructions, and tweaked to about as much as we could stand. After the complaints got to be numerous, daily, we pulled the plug. I've tried just about everything in my 16 years of running web servers, and CF just isn't up to the task.
 
Weird that people are having issues, maybe the server isn't set up properly. I've had it installed for quite a while now, haven't noticed a decrease in traffic (maybe a slight increase) and haven't noticed much with my adsense. Though the cloudflare splash is annoying, but that means there is something wrong with the server and if the page is cached, it would display it but I think majority of forums can't utilize the offline content feature due to the nature of forums. In either case, I've had a positive experience with CF.
 
Well I am disappointed with Cloudflare since I became a paid customer (2 weeks ago). Just got:

Code: 
DNS Points to Prohibited IP
 
You've requested a page on a website (technewstoday.net) that is on the CloudFlare network. Unfortunately, it is resolving to an IP address that is creating a conflict within CloudFlare's system. If you are the owner of this website, you should login to CloudFlare and change the DNS A records for technewstoday.net to resolve to a different IP address.
 
Timestamp: Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:45:32 -0700
 
Your IP address: 129.121.176.194
 
Requested URL: technewstoday.net/
 
Error reference number: 1000
 
Server ID: FL_14F5
 
Process ID: PID_4d490db46af0169
 
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0

Kinda annoys me that despite selecting the notification option if there is a problem with my site, I get no email or anything, so my site was down for at least 30 minutes before I decided to investigate why traffic just suddenly stopped.

I guess now I will have to wait several days for a ticket response (like last time) despite being a paid member! Fortunately I turned off Cloudflare to get my site to work again...
 
When I switched my forum over to CF it killed it - not sure why as I have Wordpress and vBulletin installs there. With XF most pages started to 404.
 
Tracy Perry said:
Just in case you are using CloudFare and go to set up an reverse DNS at somewhere (like Ram Node) from the VPS control panel), it may tell you that it cannot locate an A record for your IP. If so, just go to CloudFare, disable the service for that domain, wait about 15 minutes or so, and it should work. I just went through that with my site since I couldn't get my mail server to send mail to any ComCast email users. Had to resort to going through my Google Apps email (and may keep it that way anyways).
Click to expand...
Hi Tracy: if you want a Xenforo question answered ... Cloudflare hangs out in this thread.
 
Digital Doctor said:
Hi Tracy: if you want a Xenforo question answered ... Cloudflare hangs out in this thread.
Click to expand...
Yep... but all they would say (the support ticket I submitted) was "We don't do that here", which is true. The problem was that apparently with the Proxy they do, it replaces your IP with one of theirs when you are using their cloud service to cache your pages (normal). When Ram Node's utility to set your reverse DNS goes to check your domain agains the IP you have - ding - no joy, the domain resolves to one of their IP's. You have to temporarily disable all services on CloudFare, give it a few minutes and then you can make your RDNS change. Then go back and re-enable the CloudFare service. My RDNS is working now (noticed in my mail.log that postfix was able to send the queued messages). I'm still debating whether to use Google hosted apps (it takes some additional DNS configuration) or just go straight postfix on my box.

Even the Ram Node guys weren't sure what was up as they could see that there was an "A" listing for the domains I was trying. Once I figured it out I closed the ticket with them after letting them know the solution.

This last 4 days has been a lot for this caveman to wrap his head around (but now I'm pulling Ubuntu off my desktop and going to install CentOS to play with to get familiar with it). Of course, before I get finished with it gotta play a couple of rounds of Battle Field 3 on the new maps. :p
 

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