[MikeDVB]

We are excited to announce that we have partnered with CloudFlare and, as such, now offer CloudFlare directly from our cPanel. You can enable CloudFlare from inside of your cPanel under the section titled "Software/Services". CloudFlare offers many features that can help improve the overall performance and reliability of your site.

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

On average, a website on CloudFlare ...

... loads up to twice as fast
... uses up to 60% less bandwidth

... has up to 65% fewer requests
... is more secure
 against attacks
All for free!

Running a website includes all sorts of hassles like making sure your site loads quickly and that it is protected against spammers. CloudFlare makes running a website easier by taking care of it for you.

Stats and reports
You have good tools to examine human traffic coming to your site, but no insight into search engine crawlers and bots. With CloudFlare, now you do. You get an Analytics report with information that you didn't have before.

Threat control dashboard
CloudFlare protects your site from online threats like spammers and hackers. The threat control dashboard shows you the threats that have been stopped from accessing your site. You can also easily block IP addresses and countries.

Always online
As a website owner, you want your site available for your visitors. Sometimes things happen and your server goes down. CloudFlare's "Always Online" feature keeps your site online, even if your server goes offline.

If you have any questions at all about CloudFlare there is a wealth of information available on their site at http://www.cloudflare.com/.

[008Rohit]

I've again activated CloudFlare on one of my websites. Hopefully it won't disappoint me again.
The cPanel Plugin is quite useless IMO. We still have to login on their website and change the Nameservers to activate it.

[weetu]

Using cPanel X v2.6.0 I get a "not found" error when I click on the cloudflare icon. No "Software/Services" icon either.



Not Found

The server was not able to find the document (./frontend/x/cloudflare/index.html) you requested.
Please check the url and try again. You might also want to report this
error to your web hosting provider.

cpaneld/11.30.1.4 Server at echo.supportedns.com

[MikeDVB]

008Rohit, on 19 July 2011 - 04:04 AM, said:

I've again activated CloudFlare on one of my websites. Hopefully it won't disappoint me again.
The cPanel Plugin is quite useless IMO. We still have to login on their website and change the Nameservers to activate it.

Actually it's not useless, it edits your DNS zone record with us so that your domain points at their services.

weetu, on 19 July 2011 - 05:48 AM, said:

Using cPanel X v2.6.0 I get a "not found" error when I click on the cloudflare icon. No "Software/Services" icon either.

cPanel X is so outdated I'm surprised it's still available. The only reason we keep it listed is for those who use it, so that they can get into their cPanel. I would suggest changing to cPanel X3 from the "Styles" section of your cPanel.

[Ninstation.com]

I've been trying to read up more on CloudFlare to see if it's right for me.

Is the issue of needing to always use www.domain.com and not domain.com still present? I am pretty sure I've got links without www at the beginning all over the place.

A little uneasy about the caching, since I run a forum so the content is constantly changing. Also I read that it changes the incoming IPs visiting your site, which would be incompatible with a lot of the tools I use on my forum (such as bans, security trackers, etc).

Any other downsides to using CloudFlare? Reasons you might not want to?

[MikeDVB]

Ninstation.com, on 19 July 2011 - 08:35 AM, said:

Is the issue of needing to always use www.domain.com and not domain.com still present? I am pretty sure I've got links without www at the beginning all over the place.

It is, with the cPanel plugin but not if you use their DNS servers. You can set a mod_rewrite to redirect from any non-www. to www. that won't affect SEO, Indexing, SERPS, or performance - but will cause everything to go through CloudFlare as well.

Ninstation.com, on 19 July 2011 - 08:35 AM, said:

A little uneasy about the caching, since I run a forum so the content is constantly changing. Also I read that it changes the incoming IPs visiting your site, which would be incompatible with a lot of the tools I use on my forum (such as bans, security trackers, etc).

We have the server configured to parse the proxy IP from CloudFlare so that even if they visit your site via CloudFlare your plugins/site will still get the actual visitor IP. Ultimately whether or not it's right for you, is up to you.

Ninstation.com, on 19 July 2011 - 08:35 AM, said:

Any other downsides to using CloudFlare? Reasons you might not want to?

It's just a tool we've made more easy to use, ultimately whether or not it's right for you is your decision.

[Leah2]

Perhaps this is a dumb question... but I've experienced 2 site outages since using CloudFlare. The first was on my own website where CloudFlare took it completely offline one day & MDDHosting's solution was for me to remove CloudFlare from my nameservers. It worked, as soon as the DNS repropagated my website was back up.

Second outage was on a clients website. Their website was up & running fine. Their email got blocked. Remembering my previous experience I changed the nameservers back to MDDHosting & email was restored.



Am I correct in assuming that MDDHosting is advocating the usage of CloudFlare?

Does MDDHosting recommend any other redundancy solutions for our websites & email?

Thanks!!!!!!!!


PS. MDDHosting's support rocks!!!!

[Adam]

008Rohit, on 19 July 2011 - 04:04 AM, said:

I've again activated CloudFlare on one of my websites. Hopefully it won't disappoint me again.
The cPanel Plugin is quite useless IMO. We still have to login on their website and change the Nameservers to activate it.

It isn't useless if you don't have a CloudFlare account, which is the majority of people on MDDHosting.

Ninstation.com, on 19 July 2011 - 08:35 AM, said:

A little uneasy about the caching, since I run a forum so the content is constantly changing. Also I read that it changes the incoming IPs visiting your site, which would be incompatible with a lot of the tools I use on my forum (such as bans, security trackers, etc).

CloudFlare works well with dynamic content; you shouldn't have a problem with that. It will mess up the incoming IPs, though. You can use a custom X-Forwarded-For header to get the real IP.

Leah2, on 19 July 2011 - 12:54 PM, said:

Perhaps this is a dumb question... but I've experienced 2 site outages since using CloudFlare. The first was on my own website where CloudFlare took it completely offline one day & MDDHosting's solution was for me to remove CloudFlare from my nameservers. It worked, as soon as the DNS repropagated my website was back up.

Second outage was on a clients website. Their website was up & running fine. Their email got blocked. Remembering my previous experience I changed the nameservers back to MDDHosting & email was restored.

That's very odd that CloudFlare itself would cause downtime. If one of their DCs is having a problem, they route around it. I've never experienced any downtime personally with any my sites on CloudFlare. Did you set everything up correctly (could be an extra DNS entry, blocked IP address, etc)?

The only time I remember tangible downtime was when they were under an extremely heavy DDoS directed at DNS. They've added extra redundancy with more DCs and better hardware since then.

[MikeDVB]

Leah2, on 19 July 2011 - 12:54 PM, said:

Am I correct in assuming that MDDHosting is advocating the usage of CloudFlare?

No, we're not advocating anything - we're just making another tool available for those who wish to use it.

Adam, on 19 July 2011 - 01:16 PM, said:

It isn't useless if you don't have a CloudFlare account, which is the majority of people on MDDHosting.

True.

Adam, on 19 July 2011 - 01:16 PM, said:

CloudFlare works well with dynamic content; you shouldn't have a problem with that. It will mess up the incoming IPs, though. You can use a custom X-Forwarded-For header to get the real IP.

We have the servers configured to pass the correct IP address information.

[008Rohit]

Man, CloudFlare is not a reliable solution at all!
Yesterday I had enabled cloudflare for my main domain and forum subdomain. As soon as the propogation period was over I got many txt messages in my cell that none of the sites were working. After 7hrs of downtime I just added a A Class entry of my forum and disabled cloudflare for it. Since then my forum is back online again but my blog is still down because of CloudFlare. This could be because of their old nameservers that I used to use with a different host a few months back.

[MikeDVB]

008Rohit, on 19 July 2011 - 11:34 PM, said:

Man, CloudFlare is not a reliable solution at all!
Yesterday I had enabled cloudflare for my main domain and forum subdomain. As soon as the propogation period was over I got many txt messages in my cell that none of the sites were working. After 7hrs of downtime I just added a A Class entry of my forum and disabled cloudflare for it. Since then my forum is back online again but my blog is still down because of CloudFlare. This could be because of their old nameservers that I used to use with a different host a few months back.

I've seen some report issues but every time they have I was able to load the site world wide without issue. You'd want to get with CloudFlare support if you're having issues. As previously stated, it's just a tool we've made available but we do provide support for it :-).

I've enabled it on all of my personal domains without issues, and we're talking 20 domains :-).

[008Rohit]

Could it be because I didn't touch the cPanel plugin and enabled directly from their site?

I apologize!
I did a small mistake with the DNS records, Thats why my blog was down. I've emailed CloudFlare support and they've quickly replied and solved the issue.

[MikeDVB]

No problem .