[frankacter]

Anyone have any experience using http://cloudflare.com?

[Scott S]

frankacter, on 04 June 2011 - 08:13 PM, said:

Anyone have any experience using http://cloudflare.com?

I know of a fair number of our clients who use CloudFlare. Did you have any specific questions regarding it?

[frankacter]

Thanks for .the reply Scott.

Any idea on average experience for clients using it? CPU / BandWith, load times, etc

Any example Mdd / cloud flare sites you can share a URL to?

I understand there is a Cpanel addon for simplifying the integration. is this something Mdd is considering implementing?

[Scott S]

frankacter, on 04 June 2011 - 08:46 PM, said:

Thanks for .the reply Scott.

Any idea on average experience for clients using it? CPU / BandWith, load times, etc

Any example Mdd / cloud flare sites you can share a URL to?

I understand there is a Cpanel addon for simplifying the integration. is this something Mdd is considering implementing?

I haven't kept track of specifics from anyone, but I've heard a fair bit of bandwidth savings, reduced loads, etc. I'm not aware of any demo sites running cloudflare, but I imagine you could find something on the CloudFlare site. As for the cPanel addon, open a ticket and request it if you are interested so we can keep a list of who is interested and then evaluate if it is something we should do.

It's also worth noting section 7 of the CloudFlare ToS: http://www.cloudflare.com/terms.html

Quote

SECTION 7: YOUR CONTENT

You retain full copyrights in any materials served through CloudFlare. Depending on the features you select, CloudFlare may modify the content of your site. For example, CloudFlare may detect an email addresses and replace them with a script in order to keep it from being harvested. You acknowledge CloudFlare may:

• Rewrite content in order to hide sensitive information from select visitors to your site.
  
• Add cookies to your domain to track visitors, such as those who have successfully passed a CAPTCHA.
  
• Add tracking codes or affiliate codes to links that do not previously have tracking or affiliate codes.
  
• Add script to your pages to, for example, add services or perform additional performance tracking.
  
• Intercept requests determined to be threats and present them with a block page.
  
• Other changes to increase performance or security of your website.

(Because of this, I personally have decided not to use CloudFlare... However this is my personal opinion and does not reflect on MDDHosting policies, thoughts, opinions, etc)

[Adam]

I use it on all my sites and I will use it on my future sites as well.

It cuts bandwidth by a good amount. It cuts CPU a little bit, but it's mainly PHP and MySQL that cause the server load on my sites. There is a noticeable improvement on load times.

Scott:

I have been in touch with the CEO of CloudFlare for a while now, and he was talking to me about section 7. He said that they will not add or change anything in your site that you can't opt out of. Those are all features and options. They will only "tracking codes or affiliate codes" if you have outbound link tracking enabled. Ask them yourself.

They say they are going to edit section 7 and make everything more clear because it certainly does turn away people.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

The site in my sig is running CloudFlare and is on MDDHosting. Response times are not instant because there is something up with my caching and I haven't completely optimized that site yet. Here is another one of mine that is again running on CloudFlare and MDDHosting.

[Scott S]

Awesome. I'm glad to hear section 7 isn't as nefarious as one might think when they first read it. Once they get it updated, I'll probably look at using CloudFlare on my own sites.

[frankacter]

Thanks for the feedback.

The other things I'm wrestling with are whether there are any potential SEO / Security penalties being associated with Cloudflare. Given the IP address and such will be common across numbers of servers it would seem that you could potentially be bulk penalized.

[Scott S]

Your IP address has nothing to do with your SEO. It could become a problem if the server was virus infected, but I'm pretty sure that wont be happening with CloudFlare. Also, Google Webmaster Tools alerts you to such problems so you can correct them and get your listings reinstated.

[damoncloudflare]

Hi,

I actually work for CloudFlare and thought I would jump in to address a few concerns...

P.S. I won't spam the forums. I just wanted to make sure these concerns were addressed.

"Any idea on average experience for clients using it? CPU / BandWith, load times, etc"

Generally speaking, the average site sees about a 30% decrease in page load times, a decrease of about 60% in bandwidth & 65% of requests (varies by site and resources on site, of course).

"The other things I'm wrestling with are whether there are any potential SEO / Security penalties being associated with Cloudflare. Given the IP address and such will be common across numbers of servers it would seem that you could potentially be bulk penalized."
We actually have our IPs whitelisted with Google. In addition, DNS changes really aren't going to do anything to SEO.

"Awesome. I'm glad to hear section 7 isn't as nefarious as one might think when they first read it. Once they get it updated, I'll probably look at using CloudFlare on my own sites."
This particular clause largely has to do with one optional feature (Outbound Links). If the feature isn't turned on at all (an opt-in feature), then no affiliate links would be added to your site. We haven't rewritten this just yet because we have to also make some changes to our TOS regarding the app integrations we just started releasing. But I can assure folks that no links would be added without turning the optional feature on.

One area of concern is that you want to make sure you don't have our requests being blocked at the server level (things to do here) . You would also want to make sure you have mod_cloudflare installed so you still get original visitor IP (important for things like IP geolocation, etc.)

[frankacter]

Thanks for following up Damon.

You and I spoke back in March about static html caching, good to see it manifested in the form of the "always online" feature.

We've been testing cloudflare over the last few days and been very happy with it. One thing we're waiting for is some routing adjustments as our Taiwanese visitors are being routed through United States instead of through Hong Kong or Japan. I have an open ticket with CloudFlare (8900) to hopefully get that sorted.

I've also asked in that ticket, but responding here would be great as well, is there any update on the differences between an Enterprise and Pro plan? Is this based on resource usage (ie. bandwidth or pageviews) or just an extended set of features?

[frankacter]

@Scott: Regarding the usage of Cloudflare for MDD customers, are they adding the mod_cloudflare module?

Run into any issues with it and LiteSpeed?

[MikeDVB]

frankacter, on 25 June 2011 - 02:38 AM, said:

@Scott: Regarding the usage of Cloudflare for MDD customers, are they adding the mod_cloudflare module?

We won't be directly supporting CloudFlare until they clean up their Terms of Service to state exactly when they will or will not inject affiliate links into your pages.

frankacter, on 25 June 2011 - 02:38 AM, said:

Run into any issues with it and LiteSpeed?

Nope.

[damoncloudflare]

frankacter, on 06 June 2011 - 03:09 AM, said:

Thanks for the feedback.

The other things I'm wrestling with are whether there are any potential SEO / Security penalties being associated with Cloudflare. Given the IP address and such will be common across numbers of servers it would seem that you could potentially be bulk penalized.

I'm not sure why a lot of people think this happens relative to SEO.

Hi Mike,

I'll see what happened with updating those terms when I'm in the office on Monday. I think we rewrote the clause & have to wait for sign-off from a lawyer...something like that. I will just reiterate that affiliate links would not be injected without turning on optional features (for other people that might read this).

[damoncloudflare]

frankacter, on 07 June 2011 - 02:12 AM, said:

Thanks for following up Damon.

You and I spoke back in March about static html caching, good to see it manifested in the form of the "always online" feature.

We've been testing cloudflare over the last few days and been very happy with it. One thing we're waiting for is some routing adjustments as our Taiwanese visitors are being routed through United States instead of through Hong Kong or Japan. I have an open ticket with CloudFlare (8900) to hopefully get that sorted.

I've also asked in that ticket, but responding here would be great as well, is there any update on the differences between an Enterprise and Pro plan? Is this based on resource usage (ie. bandwidth or pageviews) or just an extended set of features?

We just made a number of tweaks to our datacenters in Asia & more traffic from Asis should be hitting these datacenters now.

Pro and Enterprise:
We will not make this happen based on traffic or pageviews. All of the different plans will be based entirely on access to certain features only. We still haven't completely figure out what Enterprise would have yet, or what Enterprise customers would want, so any feedback is much appreciated.

[MikeDVB]

Well keep us updated as to once the terms are updated to be a bit more accurate as to when you will and will not inject affiliate links, and we'll be much more likely to use it across the 13,000+ hosted domains.

[damoncloudflare]

MikeDVB, on 25 June 2011 - 06:08 PM, said:

Well keep us updated as to once the terms are updated to be a bit more accurate as to when you will and will not inject affiliate links, and we'll be much more likely to use it across the 13,000+ hosted domains.

Just got confirmation that it should be changed shortly. We're moving the placement of the product from our settings to apps page & we'll correct the wording there. I'll definitely try to update the thread when I know it is changed live on the site.

Did you folks already look at the hosting partner info here? http://www.cloudflar...g-partners.html

[MikeDVB]

damoncloudflare, on 25 June 2011 - 06:14 PM, said:

Just got confirmation that it should be changed shortly. We're moving the placement of the product from our settings to apps page & we'll correct the wording there. I'll definitely try to update the thread when I know it is changed live on the site.

Did you folks already look at the hosting partner info here? http://www.cloudflar...g-partners.html

Indeed, I already discussed it with Michelle Zatlyn and the only reason we didn't go forward was the clause in the Terms of Service that I brought to your attention. I've pointed this out a couple of times both via Twitter and email and neither of those seemed to get any traction.

[008Rohit]

CloudFlare earlier was creating problems with my SMF Forum's "Quote Post" feature. So I had to disable it in it. I still used to use it on my blog, but I had to clear the cache from CF's dashboard whenever I made some graphical or .php changes. One day the "site settings" option disappeared from the dashboard and I immediately stopped using CloudFlare. This was when I was on a different host.

[Adam]

008Rohit, on 27 June 2011 - 08:13 AM, said:

CloudFlare earlier was creating problems with my SMF Forum's "Quote Post" feature. So I had to disable it in it. I still used to use it on my blog, but I had to clear the cache from CF's dashboard whenever I made some graphical or .php changes. One day the "site settings" option disappeared from the dashboard and I immediately stopped using CloudFlare. This was when I was on a different host.

Did you disable the beta features? That probably would have solved your issues.

[frankacter]

I agree about the beta features, I ran into a number of issues with Rocket Loader, but since disabling (and reporting the issues!) everything has been working out really well.