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should i use cloudflare or not?
- Thread starter Stormer12
- Start date
CloudFlare Review 2016: https://www.comparakeet.com/ddos-protection-companies/cloudflare-review/
My opinion: If your site is small, with not many visitors, then you need not use it. Sites like MyBB use it for a variety of reasons, including DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack-protection. You'd need to tell us more about the site to get a more accurate answer.
I have local sites on Elitehost, and I don't use CF for any of them as they simply don't need it.
My opinion: If your site is small, with not many visitors, then you need not use it. Sites like MyBB use it for a variety of reasons, including DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack-protection. You'd need to tell us more about the site to get a more accurate answer.
I have local sites on Elitehost, and I don't use CF for any of them as they simply don't need it.
deweyzeph
Honorary Master
If you're simply looking for nameserver redundancy, round-robin load balancing and performance then Amazon's Route 54 might be a better option. I use them for all my mission critical domains. I looked at Cloudflare but it seemed like overkill for what I wanted to do.
But why? Cloudflare has a free option that does more or less the same thing Route 53 does, and more?
Snap! Free CDN, why not?!
halfmoonforever
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Actually no. If you have a small site, you'd want to put it behind cloudflare to benefit from the speed boost it will give you, especially hosting with Elitehost who has railgun direct to Cloudflare.
It also means you can handle traffic spikes better when/if your site goes viral without crapping yourself to find or upgrade hosting. I've used it for years and only see benefits. For example, one site I put behind cloudflare in December immediately saw a 30% spike in visits from people and Google was crawling much faster/indexing me higher.
Awesome.
what i've seen is that my site loads about 3 secs faster, just by activating Cloudflare. Havent played with settings yet.
it looks promising
halfmoonforever
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Awesome.
what i've seen is that my site loads about 3 secs faster, just by activating Cloudflare. Havent played with settings yet.
it looks promising
3 seconds is a huge difference in the website world, especially when you consider Amazon did a study that said something like 100ms meant 10% more sales
Awesome.
what i've seen is that my site loads about 3 secs faster, just by activating Cloudflare. Havent played with settings yet.
it looks promising
Cloudflare is just as effective for small sites as it is for large. With the caching done on CDN's, and security features, it's definitely a worthwhile investment. Just make sure you change your IP address once you are behind CloudFlare, attacks can still hit the IP if they know it.
halfmoonforever
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My experience with this is they just run a tool that checks for 22 on an IP and start attacking it. Nothing you can do about it other than harden your server. So even changing it after going on cloudflare won't matter much (I initially thought the same)
LocalBizOnline
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What you nobody mentioned is that has an option to show a full cached version of your website even if your server is down! It will display a small message on the top of your site that says it is a cached version or something to that affect.
I have been onto Web Africas home page and seen this before! i.e. Web Africas own site was down and cloudflare was showing a 'non' live version.... priceless
I have been onto Web Africas home page and seen this before! i.e. Web Africas own site was down and cloudflare was showing a 'non' live version.... priceless
koeksGHT
Dealer
This, server went down for like 6 hours and adsense kept earning with no change
halfmoonforever
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This, server went down for like 6 hours and adsense kept earning with no change
Only in some instances/pages. Cloudflare runs a "bot" much like google who crawls your website and caches pages. I initially thought that when a page is visited using Cloudflare, it will automatically be cached, which is not the case. So when your site does go offline, and you're on the free plan, even if some pages are popular and are hit quite a bit, it doesn't necessarily mean cloudflare cached it. Their crawl rate (and what / how much they cache) on a free plan is quite different to the paid ones.
I run a cloud-based setup and have a shared server hosting package somewhere as a backup. I check to see if my site is available, if it's not, I switch to the backup location using CloudFlare's API to keep my site live as to not rely on the uptime/caching ability
NullHypothesis
Well-Known Member
@LocalBizOnline you have a lovely house. I didn't know Durban was so green and lush
