Cloudflare any good?

[Peo]

I noticed cloudflare CDN mentioned in another thread. I've been thinking about something like this for a while now. Anyone tried their service? The free option or the pro one? Or do you recommend some other CDN service?

[TaoPhoenix]

From Wiki:

"CloudFlare gained media attention after providing security to LulzSec's website.[1][2] The Turkish government also utilizes CloudFlare technology."

[wswd]

The CloudFlare people are obviously going to claim the world for their service, but in my experience in dealing with clients and others who were using CF, their product is garbage. I have well-documented some of the frustration on other hosting forums when trying to help people figure out why their sites were ridiculously slow. As we speak, CF's own site just took almost 12 seconds to load. Go figure.

The security aspect makes a little sense, but if you're running a dedicated server, your network should have some sort of DDOS protection in place. The other aspect, which is the quicker speeds, makes sense too, but their actual real world performance fails to live up to their claims, at least in my experience. I absolutely believe that the server should be located closest to your potential audience, however that said, is 400 or 500 extra milliseconds really going to matter at the end of the day? And that's worst case scenario. I have about 165ms delay from Los Angeles to Germany, about 170ms to Australia, 120 to India.

That's no big deal as far as I'm concerned. Now if you're running a file downloading site with large files, any extra speed you can get is a good thing. For a normal website, however, I consider them to be largely useless.

[eUKhost]

I believe that Content Delivery Network is the best way to get the content and graphics of your website quickly, which helps to improve the page loading speed.

[CS Squad]

I would say they are not totally garbage.
Just that, their service quality is not consistent.
Majority of the time, they are ok, but sometimes, they shows you website down, although your server is still up, and it is because of their network problem.
Well, if you are using it for free, then nothing to complain about.
But if you are planning to use their premium service, I suggest you to think twice.

[Technut]

While using Clouflare (free) we found it got in the way of our clients admin pass through (WHMCS) into their server account as WHMCS depends on logging through WHM or cPanel using the original name servers, not the CloudFlare NS. We had to fool it by using the IP address and not the domain name, but that got too weird to keep up with. We did not get any speed improvement.

[Peo]

I won't even bother to try it if the reviews are this bad. But is any other CDN worth trying? I don't mind paying if it's good. (it's not for FWS by the way)

[wswd]

Peo, regardless of what CDN you choose, the major reasons (in my view, anyway) for using any CDN are as I list above. If you think you could see some advantages from using a CDN, by all means. There can definitely be advantages. For me, I have no reason to use one.

[Trel]

I have tried several different CDN services, but so far Cloudflare has been the best. There are some things that you have to accept about CDN services like Cloudflare:

1) It introduces a new point of failure.
2) It makes debugging more complex due to the extra layers.
3) It can slow down website access or cause broken site elements if they fail to load fast enough.
4) The added (free) Cloudflare security can be easily bypassed by using different IPs.
5) SSL - CDN services do not support SSL well. MaxCDN charges a very large amount (compared to their original services) for SSL while Cloudflare requires a Pro account plus an additional fee for SSL.

Other CDN services (not transparent proxy like Cloudflare):

6) Some CDN services require "push or pull" zones on special subdomains. These require website code modifications to support.

There are some notable benefits to using CDN services like Cloudflare:

1) Website bandwidth usage drops ~30 - 40% on average. This increases considerably for graphic/animation intensive websites up to 60 - 70% (Video not included.)
2) Robotic spammers/attackers are blocked using IP data from Project Honeypot and other data sources. Even servers using dsheild and spamhaus IP (CSF) blocks benefit considerably. Although this can be bypassed, it still has a very noticeable impact.
3) For websites with a general audience with traffic from all over the world, it is not practical to put the server near the target audience or in the case of free services you have no control over it. Cloudflare and similar services speed up website access considerably when the server is in Los Angeles being viewed by a user in Germany using slow DSL.
4) When combined with compression and other optimizing techniques, mobile users (iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackbery, etc) will notice a dramatic increase in website speed.