CloudFlare Service

Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > CloudFlare Service

Posted by aky007, 10-15-2011, 10:51 PM
Hi everyone, Just to share some of my experience after using Free Cloudflare service for 1 week. In the same time, compare to my Original website without cloudflare. On Cloudflare website, you find this word in their description "CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online." Accurately, it is a type community CDN which claim to have the ability to optimise and increase security of your website. Base on their model, it is reasonable to say that is true because they cache your website for speed and your website traffic go through their network for security. For example, we have a website host in gigenet and the ping is around 250ms to reach australia but when we set up cloudflare it optimise to 130-150ms which is incredible. However, we still found some of the problem after we link our website to Cloudflare. First, the website go "down" every 4-5 hours but that doesn't mean your website is totally offline. It just the speed of your wbesite will go down from maybe 130ms to like 500ms (Worst then before). We find this situation for almost everyday and we assume that this is because once you didn't go to the website for 4-5 hours the website caching in cloudflare server will be deleted. So when you go to your wbesite again, it need more time to process the caching. Second, Cloudflare is not a real large file CDN network. They will just cache some small file like java, css which is below 200kb. Then, you will say how about the large file? What for to cache the small file when it is fast enough to reach your audience. That is one of the argument point. Third, the security protection. Cloudflare is quite a good security product to elimate DDOS attack.But once again they just able to handled some small attack and not the big one. In summary, Cloudflare is really a good free service. They save your bandwidth, server resource and give a statistic for your website. You can also sometime call it a CDN but it didn't really make a big different. I will give a try to their "pro" service and review it again.
Posted by aky007, 10-16-2011, 10:12 AM
Here is the update for my website uptime graph. The website is origin hosted in gigenet with a uptime of 99.8% and after linked with cloudflare it sharply decrease to 86%. It is a Onepage website with only simple html, css and jquery. Within 48 hour http://www.flickr.com/photos/68732434@N06/6249472417/ Within a month http://www.flickr.com/photos/68732434@N06/6249472617/ Terrible =.=
Posted by Afterburst-Jack, 10-16-2011, 11:02 AM
CloudFlare have been receiving large attacks on their DNS servers recently. Didn't have this problem a while ago.
Posted by aky007, 10-16-2011, 11:32 AM
Lol they claim protect us but now they cant protect themselves. How can we trust them?
Posted by flam316, 10-17-2011, 08:08 PM
This is their clients servers, not their own site (even though they do get a DDoS on their own site every now and then). They, because of the sheer size of their network, are under DDoS attacks 24/7, and by now are pretty good at mitigating them. If you deal with them day after day after day, you eventually become so good at mitigating them that you as a customer will eventually not even notice it. In time, they will work out all the kinks and you won't notice any service interruption.

Add to Favourites Print this Article