To Cloudflare Or Not To Cloudflare

[SneakyDave]

I use the customized Cloudflare options on my sites. I can't use any of the rocketloader, or whatever its called, stuff, image compression, off, and some other options that were interfering with things.

You'll want to turn off CloudFlare to all of your admincp pages by using a page rule, or expect some issues with that.

Once you get all the peculiarities set, you may find out that it really isn't giving you much in return. But it works for my sites.

Also, make sure you have the appropriate Apache or nginx add-on installed to your web server to appropriately handle your visitor IP's (which, initially, will all appear to be coming from CF's servers)

 

[rdn]

Cloudflare website itself is down!

 

[Wildcat Media]

Cloudflare website itself is down!
View attachment 78138

The irony.

That is exactly why we haven't tried it again--same message. I would go back in a split second if the outages would go away. (And in each case, our site was not offline.)

 

[motowebmaster]

I liked Cloudflare, but eventually gave it up.

The datacenter I host in includes DDOS monitoring and mitigation, and over time Cloudflare seemed to have problems with my XF site. For example, their HTML optimization feature worked fine on vbulletin but they turned it off on my XF site because it was creating too much load on their infrastructure. So I learned how to implement modpagespeed on my own.

There were subsequent issues, that I would eventually solve on my own one-by-one. It got to the point where I had all of the features turned off but basic CDN; eventually found a new CDN solution as well.

Users don't know I've switched off of Cloudflare, they just love the improved experience

 

[Anton_Bodryachkom]

we tested CF , on and off and site loads fast without . all tests were connecting from EU

 

[Moscato]

I'm looking at migrating off cloudflare. I've had issues lately.

 

[AzzidReign]

Sucuri seems affordable with decent protection. DDoS Defend worked great for us and is inexpensive for sites receiving semi large attacks.

Like others have said, cf had too many outages in various datacenters, we got a lot of complaints about it, and it pissed me off when I would get it and they would tell me it was my server... When I could bypass cf with my hosts file and connect just fine... or the fact 100s of users could connect at that time just fine (I even has my ip whitelisted). They didn't care or want to look into the issue. Took my business elsewhere.

 

[Moscato]

Part of the migration off cloudflare, I'm working on beefing up the firewall to drop synflood, and my firewall is down to whitelist only on ports

That's related/established, http, https, and ssh ports only for incoming

Trying to minimize the attack front

Will it stop a ddos attack? No. Will it help with low grade? Sure

 

[Marcus]

Part of the migration off cloudflare, I'm working on beefing up the firewall to drop synflood, and my firewall is down to whitelist only on ports

That's related/established, http, https, and ssh ports only for incoming

Trying to minimize the attack front

Will it stop a ddos attack? No. Will it help with low grade? Sure

You should only allow ssh traffic from your IP [range]. It's also useful to have one load balancer open for 80,443 and your real server is just open to your load balancer plus ssh only for your IP.

 

[Moscato]

You should only allow ssh traffic from your IP [range]. It's also useful to have one load balancer open for 80,443 and your real server is just open to your load balancer plus ssh only for your IP.

I get the IP bit since it'd drop ssh traffic immediately

Why a load balancer?

 

[Fred.]

Is there anyone who is using Cloudflare in the EU? So your server is in the EU and most of your visitors are from the EU.

How is the performance?
I tried Cloudflare a long time ago. And I switched back a few days later after what I saw.
I still think my local server can be faster than Cloudflare for most of my local visitors. 90% = local (same country).

 

[Mag07]

I tried it (UK) for a couple of my sites, including XenForo - and while the service is up, it's decent but not brilliant. However, there are way too many outages for my taste. It wasn't unusual for random site users to be met with a CloudFlare notice that the website is down. Their support is non existent when it comes to that particular issues. I personally think their infrastructure has some serious flows, they are just to big for their own shoes atm. Can't afford for my business to not be accessible online to potential clients so often. Clients reported issues daily for the two week trial period.

 

[hellreturn]

Too much down time with CF. Half of the time, it showed my website is down while it was never down. Moved my server to DDoS protected datacenter in case if DDoS happens.

I used to use CF for spam protection as well but new spam protection features in XF are so nice that I hardly get any spammers.

CF is over rated unless someone needs common SSL.

 

[Moscato]

Too much down time with CF. Half of the time, it showed my website is down while it was never down. Moved my server to DDoS protected datacenter in case if DDoS happens.

I used to use CF for spam protection as well but new spam protection features in XF are so nice that I hardly get any spammers.

CF is over rated unless someone needs common SSL.

Even with encryption, a cert is like 8-9$ a year. Not a big deal.

It's useful for ddos attacks, or if your server is overloaded, I suppose.

 

[darenk]

Interesting reading some of these posts, not unlike things I have experienced using CloudFlare.

My web site was offline 3 - 4 days from memory whilst under a DDoS attack and went on the hunt for a provider of such services, everything was fairly good albeit a little slower as the server is based in Australia all the traffic comes from overseas.

Then we started getting cached image problems (not loading), lodged a support ticket after confirming it wasn't the server / host end and accessing the site by direct IP wasn't an issue so whatever cache was being used was causing problems. Support replies would take a week and even then a single line serving no real assistance, in the end after a month I ended up disabling CloudFlare.

Don't get me wrong I thought it was a fantastic product to start with and served it's purposed without a doubt but support for me was the killer, I don't very often require assistance but when I do especially moving to a paid service with them whilst I didn't need the extras I was happy with them only to be disappointed.

As for the income dropping, I will be very interested to see how that changes now that I have it disabled - looking promising so far though.

 

[m1ne]

Always used Cloudflare, can't go without it. I use Pro version.

 

[Moscato]

Always used Cloudflare, can't go without it. I use Pro version.

I just *stopped* using the pro version and switched to nothing because of problems.

 

[Lucas Nicodemus]

I've been using CloudFlare for several years now, and it's been really quite nice. The settings I've been using are these:

 

[Moscato]

High security? Why?

 

[rdn]

High security? Why?

Mine is completely off