- DNS Management
- CDN
- Page rules
- DNS Management
- CDN
- Page rules
- Easier DNS management via API
- Easier http to https redirect using page rules
Several features that I think is essential is not available in the free and business package. One of them is multi users. Multi users and multi API key is important for organizations in any size.
2-3 years
Initial setup is straightforward and guided by Cloudflare. NS changes for new site is easy. For existing NS migrated to Cloudflare, user must recheck current DNS records to ensure all records already available in Cloudflare.
So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed.
The speed improvements / CDN caching / Railgun.
Because our website is blazing fast it improves our conversion rates.
More than one year
We experienced some downtime in the fall of 2013, causing us to switch to Incapsula. That was a bad decision, because Incapsula is much slower.
Our customers use the web application firewall and Zero Trust predominantly.
Zero Trustability has been one of the most valuable features our customers have used.
The reporting of this solution could be improved.
This is a stable solution.
This is a scalable solution.
The technical support for this solution is really good.
The initial setup is straightforward.
We are the vendor team that implement this solution for our clients.
The overall performance of this solution is what make it one of the best solutions on the market. It is important to be able to convince customers that this solution woks well and customers will still have control, even though it is a cloud solution.
I would rate this solution a x out of ten.
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.
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:
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:
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 use this solution for security.
This solution has improved the security of our organization.
The most valuable feature is the access limiter. It allows you to control the number of request per minute.
The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage. For example, there is no support in Taiwan.
My impression is that this product is stable.
The technical support is good.
The setup was ok, but the deployment took a long time.
I have a lot of people on my team.
The licensing costs for this solution are on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.
We evaluated products from Capsula, and some security products in China.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
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.
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.
I have been using it for three months.
It's stable but we have to finetune it. We need to adjust the configuration more to meet the requirements for our website.
It is scalable. My company deploys it for end-users and in the meantime, I deployed it on my own website.
I haven't contacted technical support.
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.
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.
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!