Cloudflare Reviews

I use Cloudflare for legacy websites that I need to protect because they're very vulnerable or to secure a client's critical websites. We will implement it after a review or if the website has gotten a poor grade on one of those online checks to see if the security meets the minimum requirements. 

Usually, after I show them their website is vulnerable, I get them to sign up immediately. For me, it's more of a delta suspender as a security measure. I find that many web developers do a poor job of updating their websites and keeping all the security modules.

Cloudflare has a server, and you point your DNS there. From there, you either enable the passthrough or use their full proxy. When you use their full proxy, you get all the features. If you're only doing the DNS, it's just a basic DNS server. Most people don't use it just for DNS; they use it for proxying their websites. You can proxy other services as well, but I've only used it for web applications on different ports.

Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a certificate, okay?

In Cloudflare, we utilize their DNS and DDoS protection services. All incoming traffic to our server passes through the Cloudflare network. However, we face challenges when it comes to handling legitimate DDoS attacks. These attacks are well-crafted and mimic genuine requests to our publicly facing web pages. Despite Cloudflare's scoring mechanism, there are concerns about the effectiveness in blocking such attacks, as the traffic still reaches our infrastructure directly. Cloudflare recently introduced a new solution for Captcha, but enabling it poses challenges. Some customers are unhappy with Captcha, and modern AI-based DDoS tools can even bypass Captcha, further complicating the situation.

I only implement the DNS for customers, mainly focusing on the government in Mexico and online platforms in fintech. My customers tell me the DNS is very fast.

It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.

For the free and Pro plans, they could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components.

Cloudflare serves as both a Content Delivery Network and a security system. When integrated into the software, it optimizes content loading speeds, ensuring users access content swiftly. Additionally, Cloudflare safeguards websites from various cyber threats, providing security. 

DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately.

In Cloudflare, numerous features cater to web security needs. Conducting thorough research on your company's operations is crucial for configuring VAS. This involves determining which requests to whitelist, challenge, or block. Additionally, Cloudflare offers rate-limiting capabilities for endpoints. You can set limits to the number of requests, preventing overload situations. Another valuable feature is the ability to implement geoblocking using IDS rules.

When a user accesses the website, Cloudflare's CDN system checks for static content such as JavaScript files, CSS, and HTML. It then caches this static content on its CDN servers across approximately 140 data centers worldwide. When subsequent users request the same content, Cloudflare serves it from the nearest data center, improving performance.

Cloudflare's impact on SEO rankings and website visibility is notable. Collaborating with the business team to optimize website loading speed can benefit SEO.

We are a reseller of CDN solutions and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

I also use Cloudflare for various websites. It is a content delivery platform.

The most valuable feature is the web application firewall.

The dashboard is very easy to use. It is simple to explain and a layperson can achieve good results.

The performance is good.

We used the solution mostly as a DNS registry. I was the director of IT, and we had dozens of web assets, websites, and domain names. Instead of hosting the domain names with our content host, I would redirect pretty much all of them through Cloudflare to mitigate DDoS attacks and provide some resiliency. Our content host was largely WordPress based and backed by AWS. It was my go-to DNS registry for domain name verification or email security because we didn't run one on-premise. So Cloudflare was my DNS registry in effect.

DNS proxy was very valuable to me. The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation. In my previous organization, our main website experienced up to two million visits in a year. 

There was a four-month curling tournament from the fall to the spring season. It became important to distinguish legitimate viewers and fan traffic where they would want to go and visit our website for information on tournaments to buy tickets and merchandise and to view scores of our major national tournaments. It was important to protect legitimate traffic from illegitimate group-force traffic. 

Though Canada was not a major target for the DDoS attack, it was important that we protect our website through Cloudflare. If we saw a lot of traffic that we wouldn’t usually get, like from Russia, China, or any bot-like behavior, the product would filter it out. We did not have to think about a cyber strategy because the product did it for us. Cloudflare is one of the pioneers of cybersecurity software.

In my company, Cloudflare's PoC phase is going on, and so it is not an active contract we have had with them, but just basic experience is what I have with DDoS protection. I basically use Cloudflare for DDoS protection. My company recently tested the tool for its DDoS protection capabilities.

In terms of the tool's advantages, I would say that it can be highly automated and is very quick when it comes to propagation. The tool is user-friendly. The product's reporting capabilities are great. We need to do a bit of customization in the tool, but most of it is automated. The tool has a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.