Cloudflare Reviews

The API gives us the ability to remote control our DNS settings. With many platforms, such as PF-Sense integrating with CloudFlare, it’s an invaluable tool for things such as Dynamic DNS, Let’s Encrypt DNS-01 Challenge, or even as a rapid counter-measure when traffic diversion is needed.

The speed of everything CloudFlare is extreme. The UI is fast, responsive, and updates seem to be pretty much instant. But the biggest benefit, when mentioning speed, is that you can teach anyone in less than 20 minutes how to use it. This even includes your drunken janitor. Try that with AWS.

The Simplicity. When I mention the simplicity, it’s because of the limited information you are presented with at every screen. Although I hate the endless scrolling when searching for a function, I fully understand that less tech-savvy individuals probably have an easier time dealing with less information being thrown at them as they sift through the pile of setting CloudFlare offers. The features, functions, and terminology are also very well and clearly explained, if not almost cut out in cardboard for the reader to understand.

CloudFlare made it easier for us to manage our client’s DNS. With their outstanding UI, we have been able to reduce human errors and get a better overview of our DNS and security.

• We need templates and profiles badly for the whole setup and multi-user support with rights management.
• They need to fix their extensions and integrations faster.
• They need to add more sub-level API keys.

I have used CloudFlare for some twenty months.

We did have stability issues a few times, but it’s hard to tell. They don’t always seem open about disclosing it.

We never had scalability issues.

I rate technical support quite badly. The support person had a hard time understanding my issue.

But to be fair, we gave up on support from major enterprises a long time ago.

Now we don’t even bother. It simply takes too long time to get escalated to Level-1 support where you can have a meaningful conversation.

We had many previous solutions and that’s why we switched.

The setup was super simple, and it still is.

We don’t have advice, since we mostly rely on their free services such as DNS hosting. In general, their pricing is fair, but the price scaling is way too steep. For example, to go from 200 to 5000 dollars does not make any sense at all.

I believe I reviewed Radware for scrubbing and GratisDNS for DNS.

• Never put your eggs in one basket. Make sure that you have a contingency plan for DNS.
• Make sure that you can rapidly move domains off CloudFlare. This can be done with scripting from your existing registrar, or with GoDaddy/CFR/Route53, which is a good triangle for speedy moves.
• Keep an eye on GEO statistics on your important domains and make sure that you are able to provide a quick regional alternative.
• Spread out domains over multiple accounts and different CloudFlare Servers.
• Route53 is a good alternative to CloudFlare.

CloudFlare offers some of the most amazing features when it comes to optimizing websites & for its security for free, and all at the domain level. They were able to truly disrupt the market because prior to them, only enterprises had access to such features. They offer free CDN to all websites.

These are the following features that I use all the time:

• Content delivery network: CloudFlare caches all the static resources such as JavaScript & CSS on their servers and delivers them to the website visitors directly from their server. Because their network is spread across the world, it takes much less time to deliver these resources, thus improving the page load time, user experience and it saves bandwidth for the server too, in turn saving few hundred dollars/year and all for free.
• Security: They offer basic security features at all levels, including the free ones. However, with each plan, the level of security differs. The free plan is less aggressive in terms of security, but does a pretty decent job considering that it offers Captcha to website visitors if they feel threatened. This ensures that only humans or real traffic passes to the website and not the automated bots. It also offers web application firewall & DDoS protection, although they are available only for paid accounts.
• DNS zone manager: Because CloudFlare offers all of the optimization & security features at the domain level, it offers an excellent interface to manage DNS records. It's fast, intuitive and makes DNS management pretty easy. I manage more than 100 domains and I find no issues while managing everything.
• Flexible SSL: One of the best features of CloudFlare is that it offers a flexible certificate for all plans. That means, even if the webserver doesn't have an SSL certificate, CloudFlare enables webmasters to deliver resources over SSL.
• Page rules: Page rules give you the ability to take various actions based on the page's URL, such as creating redirects, fine tuning caching behavior, or enabling and disabling their various services. The plan level decides how many page rules you can create; the free plan provides three page rules and personally I've never had to use more than that. Using these rules, I implement flexible SSL on all my & my clients’ websites. Furthermore, it allows you to do much more than that.

As mentioned, it helps me manage DNS records for more than 100 domains with ease. It helps in web page optimization & helps keep the website secure. If it was not for CloudFlare, I would have to hire a dedicated resource to manage all this for me. However, not even couple of hours a week on CloudFlare helps me offer fast & secure websites to my clients mostly for free or at a very minimal cost.

CloudFlare is an innovative company and certainly the thought leaders in their industry. They're constantly improving their product, releasing new features, partnering with various service providers to offer add-ons. Personally, I think they're ahead of the competition and keep it that way by improving faster than the competition too.

However, what I still fail to understand is that why aren't they offering domains themselves. I'd love to buy the domain name directly from them rather than buying it from other registrars and then connecting them through CloudFlare.

I have used it since 2010; that's about 6 years. They were named as best startup at TechCrunch Disrupt and since then, I've been a user.

They've always informed me in advance about any maintenance and, personally, I haven't seen anything going wrong.

I have not encountered any scalability issues at all.

I’ve never had a reason to get in touch with their technical support.

I was using MaxCDN for content delivery network services, but have never looked back as CloudFlare offers the same feature for free.

CloudFlare is very intuitive and the setup has been straightforward from the beginning.

Most small businesses should be good with their free plan. However, as website traffic & business grows, I think one should invest in their paid plans. It's worth every single penny.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Use the page rules and flexible SSL, for sure. If you have an e-commerce portal, then implement the full SSL support.

I have used the cache feature of CloudFlare CDN.

CloudFlare is very easy to set up for my site domain.

It is very easy to maintain.

CloudFlare flushes the cache immediately, which is not supported by some of the other CDN networks such as Akamai and Amazon CloudFront. These CDNs take some time that can vary between 5-15 minutes (minimum).

No comments, because I am using it only for creating a cache flushing tool that will work on Adobe Experience Manger (AEM).

There are some features missing or might not be visible to me as I am using its free website plan. These features are:

• CloudFlare doesn't provide the cache flush history. I.e., I am not able to find out the URL information of those I have recently flushed. It makes me uncomfortable when I work in a multiple-author environment and they all have cache-flushing rights.
• It doesn't support a wildcard (*) as some of its competitors support; for example, Amazon CloudFront supports (*) annotation for flushing the complete content tree.
• CloudFlare also does not have any API as some of its rivals provide, such as Amazon CloudFront.

I have used it for the last 10 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I don't need any technical supports because there are a number of blogs with solutions for most of the problems. Because of these blogs, I haven’t used this feature until now, so I’m not able to rate this feature.

Before using CloudFlare, I used Amazon CloudFront and Akamai.

I used CloudFlare because I was creating a cache flushing tool for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). This tool will be responsible for flushing the cache from different CDN networks, such as Akamai, CloudFront, and CloudFlare.

Initial setup is straightforward and easily configurable, even if a person doesn't have any knowledge of CloudFlare. He/she can easily set up CloudFlare.

I’m not able to comment on this because I am using the free website plan.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

In my opinion, CloudFlare is one of the best CDN networks I have ever used. It provides a quick flushing feature that is not supported in some of other popular CDN networks such as Akamai and CloudFront. CloudFlare is a very easy-to-use CDN as compared to others.

Easy cache management for pages on a high traffic Drupal site, due to seasonal performance spikes. This service is helpful for our small technical team.

We have specific high-visibility "campaigns" that are scheduled about every six weeks, and the rest of the time our site is quieter. We've used Cloudflare to handle the ability to post dynamic, timebound content as well as more static content delivery.

I think it would be more helpful to have either user-submitted or Cloudflare-produced documentation, samples, or examples of situations. We had to do a lot of digging and back-and-forth with technical support for specific use cases, and it might be helpful to have more screencasts or screenshots for common situations.

I have used the solution for two years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues in the paid version.

Answers to all our questions were available when needed.

The initial setup is extremely easy but will require access to your Domain Name Servers.

The solution is a good choice for sites that require multiple types of users and multiple types of content (e.g. Drupal sites) with thousands, or tens of thousands of users or more.

They have a few introductory screencasts for people just getting started, which is helpful. I've now implemented CloudFlare on three new projects, so for most common cases it is solid and straightforward.

These are some of the valuable features:

• Free 15 year SSL certificates (I used to need to pay for these).
• Spam protection to help prevent spam and unnecessary bot traffic.
• Edge caching on a CDN. This is nice for WordPress sites. I can get away without caching static content on origin servers.
• Helps increase security as a reverse proxy.

Once a domain's name servers have been pointed to CloudFlare, you never have to worry about DNS propagation. This would be the case, for example, if you wanted to point a domain to a different EC2/digital ocean instance.

In that sense, it's marketing that could use some improvement. It is hard to call your own product a "necessity", but I truly believe that it, or something like it, is a necessity. Without it, you are risking higher costs, more spam, more failures, and less satisfied customers. They need to convince non-technical people why it's so awesome.

CloudFlare solves a lot of problems that many non-technical people don't even know exist. In addition to the obvious ones, like SSL security, spam protection, edge caching across a CDN, you have an easy way for clients to point their domains and DNS management over to CloudFlare.

Here are some scenarios:

• Let's say, down the road, you need to add an email service like Mailgun. You don't need to ask the client to add weird sounding DNS records. You can just add them in CloudFlare. This alone saves hours, if not days, of needless client communication.
• Let's say you need to point to a different server instance and you need to guarantee that the new instance's content is live at exactly 7:57 a.m. EST. Just point CloudFlare to the new instance and clear its cache at that time.
• Let’s say you need to create a stage environment.  You can add the DNS record and point that to wherever you'd like.
• I have found that clients prefer to own their own domain names, and give developers full server access. With CloudFlare, you can do just that while maintaining access to the domain's DNS records to be better able to do your job.

Another reason it's awesome is that you don't need your server to handle every request. Most of the traffic is to static resources and will be served by CloudFlare. This provides incredible peace of mind for higher traffic sites.

If your site has almost no static content, and is configured to auto-scale server instances based on demand, CloudFlare is still a relief because you will know that you are not paying for bad traffic.

Without CloudFlare, if some bot decides to send spam requests every day to your site, you'd likely pay for that traffic in one way or another.

We have used this solution for about two years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The installation was complex until I learned what I had to learn. Once you learn about domains, DNS, name servers, propagation, and web server management, CloudFlare is simple. Before you learn, it's quite hard to understand and debug DNS and configuration issues.

For example, I was once trying to SSH into the domain instead of an instance's IP address. It took me forever to understand why it was not going to work.

I recommend the free plan for most users.

Ask for guidance from someone who has done it before.

The most important feature is that they handle the basics of security matters automatically.

Honestly the product has not really improved the way of my organisation. I just let the product take care of my security in term of networking attacks, but this is not a magic product. You still have to take care of other security matters which are important in network administration.

The only thing that I think about is that CloudFlare supercharges your website, as your dedicated IP is covered behind their server. Then, if you are a target of a network attack, they will handle the traffic, and the load, then mitigate the attack. However, depending on how your network system is built if, by any chance, your main IP address is seen by attackers they can easily bypass Cloudflare and directly target your server. In that case, you need to add extra filtering directly onto your dedicated server to avoid breaches out of CloudFlare cover, or add extra anti-DDOS solutions directly onto your dedicated server.

I've used this solution for one year. Unfortunately, I'll stop it this month as, rather than being unsatisfied, my needs have changed, and my website no has longer the same traffic. I think that I can (as a System Administrator) handle the security side without it for a while.

Yes I did at the beginning, since I did not understand properly how to install the solution on my NGINX servers. I guess it was a lack of knowledges, but also a problem of speed, since I had to implement the solution in a chaotic atmosphere, since I was under attack at the time and had never faced this before, so I was not prepared.

I have not encountered any issues with CloudFlare so far. The solution has worked pretty well, but there are a couple of things which are linked to a webserver environment (NGINX in my case) that you have to be careful about when setting up. Otherwise, you may get some errors, but once the webserver is installed with CloudFlare, it should work like a charm.

Scalability is not a problem for CloudFlare since they are a cloud based solution. I think I had the biggest year for my service in 2014, in terms of traffic. My website was spread over two servers, with CloudFlare on top of them, and everything went well.

9/10. I did not really have the opportunity to use their service as a free user. However, when you are a paying user at CloudFlare, they will answer you very quickly, and with accurate answers. I did contact them on a few occasions, and they gave me good answers.

9/10. I did not really have the opportunity to use their service as a free user. However, when you are a paying user at CloudFlare, they will answer you very quickly, and with accurate answers. I did contact them on a few occasions, and they gave me good answers.

I did not, perhaps I had to, in order to be a little bit more objective about this kind of product, but since I implemented CloudFlare, I have been happy with them.

I'll say that you have to be used to managed webservers such as Apache or NGINX. It's pretty straightforward, but you have to take care with some configuration details. If you do it incorrectly, it could make your website temporarily unavailable sometimes.

I first paid for the Business plan, which was 200$/month for the first month when I had those big issues with DDOS. Then I went to the 20$/month plan. In other words, I spent about 400$ more or less on the product. I have not had a DDOS attack, since, or at least not become unavailable due to DDOS which means my ROI is pretty good. I mean when your website is offline, you first lose money like daily revenue, around 400$ for us, but you also lose your customer loyalty, and there are many more issues. No matters what's going on (attacks or not) a website must be online at all time.

In my opinion the Pro plan 20$/month is the best solution. It includes the core features of CloudFlare which is pretty much enough. If you do not have SSL, you can also use the free plan, which is almost exactly the same as Pro, just without the SSL support. The free plan has SSL support, but it does only support modern web browsers. This means that some of your customers may not reach your website if you are using SSL with a free plan.

I did not evaluate other options.

Prepare your implementation while making tests in a pre-production environment. Do not let CloudFlare take care of everything, you still have to take care of security matters for your services.

We use Cloudflare DNS for websites when our clients want to have good protection. We can filter any traffic before sending it to their web page.

The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security.

The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS.

I have been using Cloudflare DNS for approximately eight years.

Cloudflare DNS is stable. I have not had an issue.

The solution is scalable. It can scale approximately 10 percent, it is limited only by how much money you want to spend on the increase.

I used this solution for large-sized companies because it is expensive.

I have used the support and they could improve.

I rate the support from Cloudflare DNS a six out of seven.

Neutral

The setup of Cloudflare DNS is easy. It is important to search for recommendations for best practices.

I rate the initial setup of Cloudflare DNS an eight out of ten.

The price of the solution is expensive.

I rate the price of Cloudflare DNS five out of ten.

I always advise my client to protect their websites and do DNS filtering.

I rate Cloudflare DNS an eight out of ten.