Cloudflare Reviews

Highly-configurable caching options is what sells this product. Having CloudFlare properly render every page has reduced load times, bandwidth usage, and, most importantly, our server's load. Reducing the load meant we were able to get rid of several PHP/Apache caching modules that consumed a great deal of resources that do the same, if not, a less efficient job.

CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security. Also, having servers with data centers located in Germany and the Netherlands, it worked great for our EU customers. However, we couldn't exactly deliver the same load times for clients located outside of EU, for example in Asia. Having our websites cached with CloudFlare's servers all over the world, this is no longer an issue.

I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years.

We've been using it for around two years with its cPanel plugin.
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Luckily, we haven't encountered any issues with stability so far. In fact, it has increased our uptime since it wasn't unusual for us to deal with DoS/DDoS attacks on a weekly basis.

Since we are on the same plan since the first day we started with CloudFlare, we haven't had much experience with scalability.

Since customer service goes hand in hand with technical support, I'm afraid we haven't experienced their representatives going above and beyond in terms of:

• Responses within the SLA
• Not using predefined answers for issues that were somewhat "unique"

I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we reported over the years.

We haven't used CDN networks, but we experimented with Varnish, xCache, Gzip, eAccelerator and other PHP/Apache caching solutions. Since they weren't very configurable (except for Varnish), CloudFlare has provided a much better solution, allowing us to move away from running multiple caching instances on our local servers.

With every service out there, there will be hiccups every now, and then but as far as the deployment goes Cloudflare is extremely simple to implement. It is a low-risk solution since we can manipulate which DNS zones get cached and which don't. In case there's any trouble, we can disable CloudFlare, and switch to our local DNS in less than a couple of minutes.

Setting up CloudFlare is an easy gig. The only issue you might encounter is having your domain registered through a vendor that doesn't allow direct name-server manipulation.
For example, Enom resellers are known to have their domain control interface completely locked, so you have to rely on their support to handle this for you. If their support team has an issue with handling requests within the SLA - you have a problem.

Fortunately, we implemented this directly through CloudFlare as we like to avoid third party resellers whenever possible.

Having several sites that sell products, our primary concern is:

• Content deliverability
• High availability
• Fast response times

Since CloudFlare provided a solution for all the above, which indirectly affects and improves our business, our ROI has greatly increased.

The fact that CloudFlare offers a free solution, which is more than enough if you're running a low-medium traffic is just amazing. As far the pricing goes, although it's a bit pricey, it offers great value if you're running your entire business online. Content optimization and delivery is key, and CloudFlare does a great job on providing that.

CloudFlare was the first CDN we used, and luckily, we haven't been given a reason to use another solution. In the past, we used server-based software, caching modules, etc.

Since it's a low-risk implementation, I encourage all users that have issues with their response times, occasional DOS attacks and page rendering to give CloudFlare a go.

We primarily provide the solution to our clients. 

It offers DDoS protection, WAF is available, and CDN services are there. You can log the IP address countrywide and it optimizes the content for you.

The solution is very good at mitigating threats.

The product is already being developed out quite well. I don't see any room for improvement in terms of features.

The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful.

If they could offer more filters, that would be very useful for our organization.

I've been using the solution for three years.

The stability is good. We haven't witnessed crashes, bugs, or glitches. It's a reliable product.

The solution is easy to scale. A company shouldn't have any issues with expansion if they need to.

We've reached out to technical support in the past and we've found hem to be very good. We're satisfied with the level of service they provide.

The initial setup is extremely easy. There's absolutely no complexity.

Deployment times will depend on the customer due to the fact that we will need to change the authoritative main servers and customer domain. We can typically do this in one day. It totally depends on the customer and their requirements and processes. 

There is no downtime involved in the deployment. 

I'm not sure what the licensing costs are. I'm not sure if we pay monthly or yearly.

We're partners with Cloudflare.

This solution is the best product. It does not charge you for any kind of attack on your traffic. It charges you only for any good traffic. It can mitigate up to 30 TBPS of DDoS attacks. If the attack happens and if there is a surge in the traffic, it will only charge you for the good traffic. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

I'd rate it higher, however, I believe they are still building out their product. There are still items that could be added that will make it even better in the future.

• Provides a very easy DNS management: Allows you to create various sub-domains and A-record management
• Handy interface with one-click to switch the service on and off
• Global coverage supports the DNS queries with its load balancing feature
• Helps to secure your web from DDoS attacks and unwanted bots
• Has a very user-friendly interface to handle the allowed IPs if you need to bypass/block any particular region or identified bots.
• Web optimization features such as ‘Automatic Content Caching’, ‘Rocket Loader’, and ‘AutoMinify’, which help to minimize the website loading time and increase the website response.

• We use the DNS management for all of our domains. It brings all websites under the umbrella of CloudFlare.
• We no longer require any other security levels, as all websites under CloudFlare wrappers are secure with DDoS protection.
• We do not need to implement complex caching techniques as the CloudFlare content caching helps to minimize the website load time.

For DDoS protection and website downtime, it would be nice to have a feature to provide email/SMS alerts that can be implemented like Pingdom and other solutions.

I implemented these solutions in 2013.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

Until now, I didn’t require much technical support. I try to find any help by myself through the interface.

I did not use any previous solution. In fact, I searched for a few and selected CloudFlare.

The product is very straightforward and simple to implement. Those are the main reasons for using it.

I haven’t gone through the other pricing plans. For the services I am using, it is a bit expensive. It is worth the price when you weight it against time and cost.

Before selecting CloudFlare, we looked at Amazon products. Although AWS provides a range of services and is a standardized platform, I found CloudFlare to be a much easier and faster solution for websites.

If someone is looking for a secure and optimized wrapper over an open website, I would suggest CloudFlare services. It will instantly help you to secure and optimize websites/web pages or blogs. It is quick, easy to use, and simple to implement.

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.

We are using Cloudflare for the CDN for our applications. We deployed the solution as SaaS.

Cloudflare has many features. We can control profits, block attacks, and use a Global Location CDN. Additionally, we have a single console from which we can manage multiple tasks.

In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM. Compared to other vendors and Cloudflare, there will be more downtime. We encountered this issue last year, and there have been a few occasions when Cloudflare was not accessible in certain regions, not all global regions or speed regions, but the website went down and it took Cloudflare a long time to restore the service.

I have been using the solution for two years.

We have experienced a few periods of downtime in the last two years, but the solution is generally stable.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup is not difficult. All the steps for deployment are documented. We followed the step-by-step instructions for configuration.

The implementation was completed in-house by three employees.

I give the price a five out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

Maintenance is easy; we receive a notification whenever maintenance is needed, as well as if a major restoration is required and what the likelihood of the system going offline will be.

I recommend Cloudflare.

It's very user-friendly. A user who doesn't completely know how everything works can easily sign up and have an account. 

It is very clear and the information is very useful.

There is a very good reporting system for statistics.

There are some issues with the CDN services.

Also, the connection could be improved.

There are some issues with stability. We have connection issues.

We are satisfied with technical support.

We don't have any issues with the price.

I would rate Cloudflare an eight out of ten.

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.