Have you signed up to Cloudflare?

More than happy to answer any questions. The short answer is that we can speed up the site with CDN like features (content delivery network) & then also offer an additional layer of protection to the site by stopping known threats from hitting the site (bad bots, etc.).

yeah, but for simple connective errors and latency, Cloudflare would throw an error stating "the site is not available" which is really annoying. Check this out in google

damon, i visited your website yesterday. Can you tell me what exactly do you "cache"?

I have lots of video on my e-learning website (about 150K UQ a month). Can you host also these videos?

Cloudflare is amazing! You should grab it, lol.

Cloudfare looks like it's primary business is as a CDN (Content Delivery Network) their security and other things seem to be add on services. (I use to work for one of the largest CDN's in the country.)

Is bandwith an issue for you? I would also say nothing is for free...at some point GB transferred has to cost something...what do you have to pay at that point.

What platform is your site on and is security and issue?

it depends a bit on your site.. I'm using it for some sites and I think it is a good service.

Just don't forget that you have it when working on your site, otherwise it will confuse you (you can temp turn it off)

We hired an Elancer to implement a series of site performance optimizations to improve page load times. We’re using a CMS that’s not optimized out of the box and we did not have the in house technical expertise to tweak MySQL, Apache, etc. This was a relatively inexpensive investment and it was well worth it. This partner also recommended that we consider signing up for CloudFlare’s free service for further load time improvements. Unless your hosting provider has access to some sort of special CloudFlare program, you may want to consider signing up with CloudFlare directly to ensure that you have full control. It’s a fairly simple process and they do a good job of explaining what needs to be done. If you’re looking for performance enhancements, I would start with hiring an expert to make tweaks to your systems IF you have access to these systems. If not, you’ll have to rely on your hosting provider’s built-in optimizations or hope that they’ll be open to suggestion if there are any major issues. To gain deeper insight into your load times and any potential issues, there are tons of tools out there such as Yslow, Google’s PageSpeed, or site’s like webpagetest, pingdom, and many others. In our environment, the majority of our speed gain originated from the tweaks and then we activated our free CloudFlare account to shave a few more seconds off. If a CDN like CloudFlare is your only option, it will definitely help, but your best bet is to run with a multi-faceted approach if possible.


For those of you that have added layers of security, I would caution you to gain a full understanding of the implications of using a CDN like CloudFlare to prevent unanticipated resource access challenges that can set you and your team back in terms of troubleshooting. For example, we have certain country blocks in place and we also have key ports locked down by IP. You just need to be cognizant of the fact that you need to make a few adjustments for direct access to the site’s systems in these instances. CloudFlare does a pretty good job of explaining some of this as well, but we did spend some time initially trying to figure out what was happening.

Some of my sites can't be accessed from Oceania when using Cloudflare. I have to turn it off to fix the issue.

CloudFlare is generally good and I'd recommend you to get it. With it being free as well, it also speeds up your website and is a great anti-DDOSer

I use it, it's pretty great. I especially like the CDN features, it's so much less work than setting up your own!

Its just a reverse proxy essentially.

On low-traffic websites hosted with a good provider or primarily static websites, there's little use for it because your site will be fast in most cases anyway.

It comes in useful if you have no knowledge of caching and such as they will handle it automatically. However, it again becomes pointless almost, if you learn how to setup caching by yourself (e.g. using varnish or some similar application).

Its quite handy for medium-traffic sites or websites hosted with unreliable providers as you can have pages remain available at high speed while the true backend is being slow.

You can give Cloudflare a try, because it is free and it will cost you nothing. I've used it on some of my wordpress websites with some cache plug-in, but it didn't perform so well. I can recommend MaxCDN as content delivery network though. They are not free, but they are cheap and they put great promotions. I've bought MaxCDN for only $1.