Cloudflare, my cloudflare stats after about a days use.. ok I'm impressed

[sross]

53k users 1.1million posts, just started using cloudflare yesterday. If they prove reliable and it continues to be free, then -wow-



As you can see quite a lot of requests and bandwidth taken from my server. Performance is great, server loading is down, etc. I have not experienced any weirdness yet. The only problem so far is that with cloudflare JS minify enabled some users could not see graphics on the ckeditor.

[Zachery]

It sounds like they're capturing usage data, could be wrong though. But I wouldn't put it past a company doing something for nothing

[sross]

That was my first thought, but after researching them a bit it seems pretty legit. They offer a free service but then offer pro & enterprise services to generate their primary revenue. So far no indication they are selling off data. Big funding to them and iirc 12 global data centers setup already. If they ever did get naughty I'd just switch my DNS, as that is the only change needed to use their service.

[Zachery]

Well, they might not be selling it directly, but I wouldn't put it past them to offer other services later (like an adnetwork) and have fairly targeted content via ads due to network distro. Plus they're capturing free data from you now for later. I'm just thinking outloud. If it works, and makes life easier, then I cannot think of a reason not to use it. Just remember not to compress js and everything on vb's end should be fine.

[dieKetzer]

iirc cloudflare are run by the project honeypot people. i dont think they are doing anything too sly. perhaps cloudflared sites are somehow used to benefit honeypot? i dont know.
that being said, i found cloudflares modest speed improvement to not be worth all the support issues it created for me. even as a premium account holder, there were always people complaining that the site was doing this or that, cloudflare servers were always having a problem in some random datacentre, etc. i gave up on them after a few months.

[sross]

They must be continuing to improve, well... so far I have not had reports of issues on two forums. On my main board they are serving around 700,000 requests per day, and serving 65% of all my bandwidth (about 5 GB a day). It's allowing me to run on a much lower server spec. I'm now running my big board on a $120 Joyent cloud server and by the looks of things might be able to drop it down to a $60 cloud server. This is coming from a previous 8core dedicated server running Raid10 -and my site has never been faster. It may be too good to be true, only more time will tell, but I can really use the cost savings at this point.

[Zachery]

Were you just using out of the box apache for your old machine? (that just seems like a lot of hardware to be having such big problems).

[IBxAnders]

Really interesting.

[sross]

Were you just using out of the box apache for your old machine? (that just seems like a lot of hardware to be having such big problems).

I'm not sure if that question was to me. My last server did not have big problems, if anything it was just way overspec for my site. The high spec was for some other projects that did not eventuate. So, it was good to get into the cloud and take advantage of that tech + cloudflare.. the forum is very fast and my cost savings are dramatic. There was a bit of pain going from my cpanel/whm environment to Virtualmin environment but now it's smooth sailing.

[sross]

Here is day2 (ish) stats. All that bandwidth is basically them serving my vbGallery images (It's a photography community). And I have to say browsing my gallery the gallery homepage and images all snap into view when clicked. There seems to be no degradation in speeds here, if anything I think it's much faster than before.

[Maurd]

I followed Cloudflare for some time on WHT. It seems like a decent idea, the staff appear friendly enough.

Their ToS are a little off-putting, though. I personally wouldn't use it, but it's great they are proving useful to you.

[GHST]

They say that they won't share your data with 3rd parties unless you agree to it.

https://www.cloudflare.com/security-policy

[tr1cky]

You can see on many examples that cloudflare isn't reliable on big websites, they will surely kick you off, because big sites always have attacks and they kick you very fast on any attack.

Best example: hackforums.net

[sross]

You can see on many examples that cloudflare isn't reliable on big websites, they will surely kick you off, because big sites always have attacks and they kick you very fast on any attack.

Best example: hackforums.net

some commentary on such issues (mixed viewpoints) http://news.netcraft.com/archives/20...loudflare.html

In some ways that is understandable if your site is repeatedly attacked on such a level. I would think if it's a one-off or mild attack they would work with you on that (especially if you are a paying customer). I'm sure there are plenty massive sites out there using cloudflare without issues or getting booted. Have you seen their real time stats? https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map mind boggling. BTW they just brought up a new datacenter in London, bringing their total to 13.

[AlexanderT]

You can see on many examples that cloudflare isn't reliable on big websites, they will surely kick you off, because big sites always have attacks and they kick you very fast on any attack.

4chan.org has been under heavy attack lately. Seems like they have the situation under control now - and they are using cloudflare it appears.

root@mail ~ # host boards.4chan.org
boards.4chan.org has address 199.27.135.129
boards.4chan.org has address 199.27.134.129
root@mail ~ # host 199.27.135.129
129.135.27.199.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer cf-199-27-135-129.cloudflare.com.
root@mail ~ # host 199.27.134.129
129.134.27.199.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer cf-199-27-134-129.cloudflare.com.