Anyone using CloudFlare on multiple sites?

[RobertFisher]

We are considering using CloudFlare as a CDN for a large group of sites. The fees are $5 to $200 depending on many factors. We tried the free trial on one site and were impressed with the results. I am wondering if any of you have any longer term experience with this and performance metrics, etc.

[directionmarketing]

Does anyone know how many domains you can have under the business plan? Is that just for one site?

[N1ghteyes]

Since im here im going to respond to this with a couple of things.

"While Cloudflare offers many optimization services and DDoS protection, many of them break Magento and Wordpress functionality."

I've not had any issue with this. Typically if something does break in WP or Magneto its pretty simple to fix. Personally, i dont run WP sites without cloudflare, its too much of a security issue.

" Implementing caching and Google PageSpeed with Nginx or Apache shows much better performance,"

You should do this anyway....

" Worse though, Cloudflare doesn't allow you to use your own SSL on any plan under $200/moth"

Sure it does, i run 40 + sites on standard Comodo SSL certs on Cloudflare pro without issue.

"If you're a Pagespeed/YSlow nut, they you'll really be upset to learn Cloudflare adds a security cookie to everything, so there is no way to have serve content on a cookie-free domain when using Cloudflare DNS"

Thats a fair point, though perhaps not such an issue in most situations.

"Customer service is also slow and mostly automated, so don't expect great service on unpaid plans."

Again i dont really find this. Most of my accounts are CF Pro but for those that arn't, i dont notice any difference in support level. I know Business and Enterprise plans get faster support but for $200 + a month, i'd expect that anyway.

[kwoolf]

Old post but wanted to add a little. Been with Cloudflare for years but want to switch, so I searched Moz to learn what might happen to site ranking. I'm now neutral about Cloudflare and actually turned off extra services just to use their DNS for a few sites. While Cloudflare offers many optimization services and DDoS protection, many of them break Magento and Wordpress functionality. Implementing caching and Google PageSpeed with Nginx or Apache shows much better performance, especially in Asia. Worse though, Cloudflare doesn't allow you to use your own SSL on any plan under $200/moth. So if you have your own EV SSL, plan on dishing out for this. If you're a Pagespeed/YSlow nut, they you'll really be upset to learn Cloudflare adds a security cookie to everything, so there is no way to have serve content on a cookie-free domain when using Cloudflare DNS. Customer service is also slow and mostly automated, so don't expect great service on unpaid plans.

[RobertFisher]

I just looked and....Out of the top 100 pages by views, 90/100 have decreased load time by one half. Pretty serious stuff there. 10 have increases of like 10 to 30% but nothing alarming.

Best

[LesleyPaone]

Since this seems like this is a pretty active site, how is the GA pagespeed tab showing that things are doing since the switch?

As for as the threats blocked, they just blacklist ip addresses, they are not usually actual threats. Think about when you run a virus scan and it says it protected you from 125 threats and then you just see that it is talking about tracking cookies. Most of the threats are known TOR exit nodes. Which some people use them for things like that, but others use them because they can access content that is blocked in their country.

As far as the file requests, it does help shed file load, which is good. But that is what a CDN would do as well. Both of them do not cache page requests either, so they do not change the actual processing and page loading time of the site. They just change the asset loading time.

[responsivelabs]

That sounds like a great plan. Furthermore, on the high-performance sites that you have the higher CF plan on, you'll also get Railgun. I've had a chance to utilize CF's railgun technology through a partnership with a hosting company, and i can say that its quite effective with even dynamic content (unlike most CDNs). Furthermore, it may decrease your overall technology budget by mitigating the need for a separate CDN. Visit https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun to read more about it.

Good luck!

[RobertFisher]

Our intent is to subscribe to pro, go with the lower option $5 per month on less critical sites and the much higher options on critical high performance sites. I really appreciate the input and time, I am glad I had one last good answer to give. 
All the best,

Robert

[responsivelabs]

I've been using Cloudflare for about 2 years now with 10+ sites (including 2-3 that receive 20k+ unique visitors monthly), and to be quite honest I have not found a DNS provider that provides the same level of optimization and security as them. I've tried some of the top companies in the DNS industry (including Dyn, which I still use for enterprise DNS redundancy & fail-over), however they all seem to be missing functionality that I regularly use within Cloudflare, which I ended up moving back within a week. Furthermore, performance-wise, I've yet to find a service that can match site load times accomplished with an optimized CF setup.

It does take some time & experimentation to dial in the optimization/security settings within Cloudflare for your particular site(s)/technology, however once dialed in, everything runs quite well. My favorite features are the DNS-based smart redirects (you can create URL patterns which will automatically redirect pages for you at the DNS-level.) along with their DNS-based firewall. The latter stops malicious attacks at the DNS level (it can cut off the hacker/spammer at the DNS level before it hits your serrver, as long as the user accesses your site using the protected domain), and has been quite effective for us for the past 2 years. Furthermore, Cloudflare reduces load times in various ways (caching at the DNS-level, JS/CSS minified, etc). They also allow you to integrate apps such as Google Analytics without having to directly add the JS code into your site.

In regards to Cloudflare optimization, after implementing the proper settings for one of my clients ecommerce sites, we've seen load times decrease by about 3 seconds on avg. Like I've said, it does take some time to get the optimal settings for your specific site, however I feel that its definitely worth it.

I'd recommend subscribing to CloudFlare Pro ($20/month for first site, and $5 for each one afterwards), as it comes with the WAP firewall at the DNS-level (which works almost TOO well. Sometimes detects actions on the backend as SQL injection due to the query patterns), along with SSL support (really cool, you can have SSL connected at the DNS-level). I believe you also get a LOT more slots for the smart redirects, which is invaluable to me. I know I probably sound like I work for CF, but to be quite honest I've experienced nothing but great service from them. The one time I had an issue, I contacted them on Twitter (which they actively check) and they replied/fixed the issue for me within a few minutes.

Hope this helps you make a more informative decision. Feel free to send me a private message if you have any other specific questions. I'll see what I can do to help out.

[RobertFisher]

I forgot to post before I hit good answer and it wiped out my comments. Thanks for the detailed response. I will show our info to our head of dev. 
Best

[RobertFisher]

jStrong,

Thanks for the info. I think responded to both you and Prestashop at once, sorry. I like the security features a lot given some client sites are fairly sensitive. 
Best

[RobertFisher]

Thanks so much for the help here. That is the other piece that we liked about what we saw in the initial tests - security. Here is the data (sorry a bit redacted due to confidentiality needs) from our head of development. It is a reasonably large site with quite a bit of traffic over a short time interval ( a few days)

• 126k total pageviews
• 105k regular visitors
• 20k crawlers/bots
• 1.5k threats (which Cloudflare forces to jump through hoops to access the site, and if failed they are denied)
• 523k total requests for files and pages - 207k were handled by Cloudflare rather than having to be handled by our server
• 8.3 GB of bandwidth total - 2.0 GB of which were handled by CloudFlare, reducing our usage and allowing other sites to deliver faster.

I appreciate the info re cookies, I will have to look into that as there may be client concerns. Great help!

[LesleyPaone]

I personally do not like cloudflare. All is fine and well until a site on your DNS starts getting DDOS'd. Then it will affect your site as well. I tend to optimize a site how I want it and then use MaxCDN as a CDN network. Then you do not have to worry about compatibility issues either, like mentioned above. I do keep a cloudflare account however, I use it to move in front of sites that are actively being attacked.

One thing I don't care for is that cloudflare tracks your users and is basically building up a tracking database. If you look on your served resources there are a couple of cloudflare cookies for this purpose.

[Whebb]

Hi Robert,

We use them on a couple client sites, more for security then CDN, but the service worked as advertised and their support was helpful when needed.  Also, it did not conflict with any of the sites functionality. The client has been using the service since late last year and is satisfied as well.

[Ray-pp]

Hi RobertFisher,

I've recently integrated Cloudflare Business into a large ecommerce site (top 50k Alexa). The site had several issues that impacted page load speed, our new visitors were experiencing very long load times in the 4-7 second range.

Cloudflare is amazing for the price. at $200/month it greatly reduced the amount of HTTP requests, minification reduced our page size, and it even saved a lot of bandwidth (which translates to server cost savings and/or more for your money).

Their support service has been consistent, however, I know their Business and Enterprise customers are priority.

Most other CDNs are going to cost far more than $200. It reduced our page load speed around 50%, before optimizing the other performance configurations they have available.

You do need to do some quality and assurance testing. With any CDN, when you deliver certain things differently, like javascript files, a new conflict could arise. For example, our sliders were having trouble rendering after integrating CF, so we had to adjust the settings to get them loading properly again.

Is there something more specific I could tell you about it?