Cloudflare Reviews and Pricing

Director of Development at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

Nov 4, 2013

Wonderful service, It reduced my bandwith and server load immensely

I am a paid Cloudflare customer. The service has been wonderful. As in all services, there is a setup that is required and a learning curve.

One of the biggest reasons for me to implement it was to reduce server load. My forums keep growing and to reduce the need to keep upgrading, we tried Cloudflare.

It has reduced my bandwidth and server load immensely. For example, my bandwidth dropped from 45GB/month to 10GB/month. Server hits went from 3.5 million/month to 600 thousand/month.

Cloudflare is setup if the server does not respond timely, then your users will see an error message. This is an indication of a slow server versus a Cloudflare issue.

Who's the culprit- Cloudflare or hosting?

When I have seen the CloudFlare error screen for site is unavailable, it has always been due to slow response on the webserver. (validated by using a series of http responders hitting CloudFlare and the webserver directly over a 60 day period.)

One of the keys is to make sure your hosting provider is using the CloudFlare extension and they have listed all the CloudFlare servers within your firewall settings. All your traffic will come from only a couple of IPs. If your server and firewalls are not setup to support this concept, they will trip DDOS or Flooding rules.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user253797IT Consultant, Business Owner, Lecturer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

Report as inappropriate

Sep 4, 2016

We have Anturis monitoring on our servers where we can watch server response times, cpu and memory usage, sql server load and many other parameters. There have been many cases in the past where Cloudflare would come out with 'site unavailable' but there was nothing wrong with our server - no delays or any errors. I contacted them to explain to me why but to no luck. I have to say that although their service is very good and cost effective, their support is exactly the opposite. We have tried multiple times to resolve issues with them, but they are always trying to push things to your end :-). Fortunately we haven't had any issues with them for months now!

See all 2 comments

reviewer1330161

Information Technology Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees

Apr 27, 2020

Download

Easy to configure and develop documentation to see how the firewalls are configured

Pros and Cons

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."

What is most valuable?

It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls. It's also more automated. You can have a website injected with SQL command. We put in an SQL injection and Cloudflare rejects it.

What needs improvement?

It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it for three months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's stable but we have to finetune it. We need to adjust the configuration more to meet the requirements for our website.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is scalable. My company deploys it for end-users and in the meantime, I deployed it on my own website.

How are customer service and technical support?

I haven't contacted technical support.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was quite straightforward. There is a button with an explanation. We deployed it within minutes. It has an SQL database and it only took minutes to apply it on the website.

What other advice do I have?

Try to deploy it on your website and test it on your site to see how it works.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

It already has a good feature set, I don't think it needs anything else. To make it a ten, the documentation should be simplified.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner