What is Cloudflare ? How does it help webmasters ?

[Adam Howard]

Odd. That was the first result for that URL when I googled CloudFlare IPs.

Google seems to be more customizing their algorithm... ie... If you're signed in they keep a record of your searches and now offer results more toward your typical search inquires. It's something they've been testing for a while and ironically, I seem to be their guinea pig.

 

[damoncloudflare]

They do. It also depends on which datacenter of Google's that you're hitting when you make the search request (you'll see different results if you're in a different country or signed out, for example).

 

[a legacy reborn]

They do. It also depends on which datacenter of Google's that you're hitting when you make the search request (you'll see different results if you're in a different country or signed out, for example).

Or if you happen to stumble upon one of their easter eggs .

 

[damoncloudflare]

I never seem to get the Easter Eggs.

 

[a legacy reborn]

I never seem to get the Easter Eggs.

But they are awesome. They have removed many of them, but when they were there, they occupied most of my time .

 

[damoncloudflare]

A couple of updates relative to our network and performance of note, including new datacenters. New datacenters:

Warsaw
Stockholm
Prague
Vienna
Toronto

And support for SPDY has been rolled out to paid CloudFlare plans (SPDY requires SSL).

 

[Wildcat Media]

I can't say I'm much impressed lately. A couple of month ago, I was getting regular "site offline/no cached page available" errors on a very low traffic site/forum, somtimes lasting five or ten minutes. I would get a few of those per week. I disabled it, as you can imagine, and moved my nameservers back to our web server.

I just enabled it on our big board forum, as many as 800+ users online at a time. It went active this afternoon. This evening, one of the staff noted a half hour outage where he kept getting that error page.

I'm giving it until tomorrow afternoon. If we see the page again, rest assured I'm done with CloudFlare completely. An outage under a minute is one thing, but a half hour? We can't afford that.

 

[damoncloudflare]

We haven't had any service issues at all for that amount of time. It is vitally important to make sure requests from CloudFlare's IPs are not being throttled or blocked by custom server rules (or plugins) and at the hosting provider (our ips need to be whitelisted). I would also recommend making sure that original visitor IPs are being restored with XenForo.

If you're still having additional issues, please contact us with the domain and traceroutes from affected users would be helpful.

 

[Wildcat Media]

We moved nameservers back to our host already, unfortunately...

 

[damoncloudflare]

We moved nameservers back to our host already, unfortunately...

Drat. You really didn't have to do that. A lot of people don't seem to know that you can actually Pause CloudFlare in your settings so we go direct to the server. Having the nameserver point to us is the only way we can really test what the issue is

 

[hellreturn]

I can't say I'm much impressed lately. A couple of month ago, I was getting regular "site offline/no cached page available" errors on a very low traffic site/forum, somtimes lasting five or ten minutes. I would get a few of those per week. I disabled it, as you can imagine, and moved my nameservers back to our web server.

I was thinking, I am the only one getting that error! Darn, it's just not me. I was thinking to move back too....

 

[Wildcat Media]

Drat. You really didn't have to do that. A lot of people don't seem to know that you can actually Pause CloudFlare in your settings so we go direct to the server. Having the nameserver point to us is the only way we can really test what the issue is

We had a couple of other minor things that we didn't have time to iron out. It was more like damage control at the time, if you will. One thing my forum moderators wanted back was the ability to trace new accounts via IP addresses, as we have a lot of spammer activity. There must be some sort of modification we could have made to fix that, although I do not want to work with vBulletin any more than I have to. (Reason below. )

If we get some leeway in the near future I would like to revisit this...but for now we have to get things in order, as we are preparing to make a move on converting to XenForo and possibly move to a new or upgraded server as well. Just a case of not wanting to put too many variables into the mix. My favorite part of CloudFlare is being able to block all the malicious accesses...just having them turned away is less waste of bandwidth.

 

[DRE]

How come avatars don't change when using cloudflare cdn as an external data url?

 

[Wildcat Media]

My guess is that they are still cached by CloudFlare's CDN. And it depends on what the cache expiration is set to on your server.

 

[damoncloudflare]

We had a couple of other minor things that we didn't have time to iron out. It was more like damage control at the time, if you will. One thing my forum moderators wanted back was the ability to trace new accounts via IP addresses, as we have a lot of spammer activity. There must be some sort of modification we could have made to fix that, although I do not want to work with vBulletin any more than I have to. (Reason below. )

There are modifications available for vBulletin.

 

[damoncloudflare]

I was thinking, I am the only one getting that error! Darn, it's just not me. I was thinking to move back too....

Please make sure nothing is blocking requests from CloudFlare IPs.

Note: If getting in the admin back end, however, a PageRule would generally fix this. Some back end functions on sites can lead to a timeout.

 

[Wildcat Media]

We're hoping to move away from vBulletin as soon as we can (and it will be within the next few weeks), and/or looking at a server hardware change as well. Once we settle on something we might revisit this. I like the ability to block all the malicious traffic...

 

[Adam Howard]

CloudFlare is the server you want to like, but seems that deep down they do everything in their power for you to want you to hate it. They seem to have a dislike with MaxCDN or at least some of MaxCDN

DNS Points to Prohibited IP

You've requested a page on a website (www.sociallyuncensored.eu) 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 www.sociallyuncensored.eu to resolve to a different IP address.

• Timestamp: Thu, 06 Sep 2012 09:41:43 -0700
• Your IP address: 69.174.26.116
• Requested URL: www.sociallyuncensored.eu/
• Error reference number: 1000
• Server ID: FL_11F12
• Process ID: PID_1346949703.403-1-41162471
• User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0

I get the above when using cdn.sociallyuncensored.eu

 

[damoncloudflare]

CloudFlare is the server you want to like, but seems that deep down they do everything in their power for you to want you to hate it. They seem to have a dislike with MaxCDN or at least some of MaxCDN

I get the above when using cdn.sociallyuncensored.eu

We don't dislike MaxCDN. That particular record type has to go direct in your CloudFlare DNS settings, which means that you have to change the cloud from orange to gray (no point in proxying that CDN record & it creates a redirect loop).

 

[Adam Howard]

We don't dislike MaxCDN. That particular record type has to go direct in your CloudFlare DNS settings, which means that you have to change the cloud from orange to gray (no point in proxying that CDN record & it creates a redirect loop).

OK.... There is no cloud ... Orange, gray, or otherwise .... Please advise...