Cloudflare problem

[StuartKicks]

Would love some thoughts and advice.

I am a noob. Just back in the forum game. Wanted that shiny padlock and seen that Cloudflare would offer that on the free tier.

I set everything up and went through the cloudflare configuration and enabled everything they suggested, including caching I guess. Everything worked for about 14 hours but some pages were a bit slow to load.

This morning the site became unreachable or barely reachable it was like none of the static content was loading, it was all just text. I figured it was cloudflare so enabled developer mode and everything worked again. In my haste just to have the site up I set a rule not to cache anything at www.the-sps.org/*

Is this the best way to go about things, should I allow caching if it’s causing problems? Website is plenty fast without it?

www.the-sps.org

 

[Chromaniac]

using cloudflare for just ssl seems like a bit much. check with your host if it can provide you with a free ssl. most do these days. if you are on managed hosting, explore let's encrypt and get it on your server.

cloudflare default settings do not create any problems with xenforo. it might be worth looking into why css was not loading for you with caching enabled.

 

[StuartKicks]

Nah host is being a bit of a rip off, they don’t support lets encrypt. They do allow installation of other certificates or I can pay them £50 which they haven’t got a hope in hell of. Do you have any other suggestions for certificates?

 

[Chromaniac]

zerossl and sslforfree both offer free ssl certificates that are valid for 90 days. not sure how it works out and if you can use them on your host.

 

[StuartKicks]

Was just looking into SSL for Free, it would seem to work, they only sign for 90 days though. I’m trying to weigh up if I should just continue using Cloudflare? Now that I’m not letting them cache I haven’t had any problems, is there any explicit issues you know of that I could run into if I continue to use them?

 

[Chromaniac]

gogetssl.com has low costs SSL certificates.

i suppose there is no harm in continuing to use cloudflare. though do look into why the cache feature is breaking the site because it shouldn't. enable it when there is low traffic on the site and try to figure out what could be the issue.

 

[StuartKicks]

gogetssl.com has low costs SSL certificates.

i suppose there is no harm in continuing to use cloudflare. though do look into why the cache feature is breaking the site because it shouldn't. enable it when there is low traffic on the site and try to figure out what could be the issue.

Thanks for that link I’ll check it out.

with regards to CF, do you use them, do you have any suggested rules that you use with them?

 

[Chromaniac]

i have cloudflare enabled on my forum. it works fine on default settings. i cannot really think of any of the settings that would cause the problem you are facing. i do not have any custom rules enabled. except for one which blocks access to register page if the visitor is not from india. (my site really has no use to anyone outside india and it saves a lot of spam accounts from registering)