Cloudflare - improve website performance, security, and uptime - for free :O
  • DJSilkwormDJSilkworm
    Hey,
    Frustrated with the speed of my blog, I was doing some searching for some sort of free CDN, and I stumbled across Cloudflare.
    They cache your blog's resources on a pool of global servers, hopefully improving website loadtime all around the world. I've seen speed increases of 70% or so, and most other sites I've seen using it are improving their speed by 30-40%; it also blocks malicious visitors and keeps your website up if it goes down.
    I personally love it, I reckon it'd be useful for anyone looking to improve their blog's performance with minimal cost and setup.
    Has anyone else used it, and have you got good results as well?
  • TimTim
    Looks interesting. I'm just curious how they can offer so much or free?
    I see the freemium model, but I just can't any small to medium publisher upgrading at all.

    A 70% speed increase is awesome though.
  • DJSilkwormDJSilkworm

    Yeah, I'm running on some real budget shared hosting as I have virtually no money to pay for running a blog, my website's loading speed is still far from perfect, but between cloudflare, externally hosted resources, and agressive caching and optimizing, it's certainly a lot better than when I first got it.

  • onmyradaronmyradar
    This is intruiging. I just signed up my website for the free plan, so I think I'm going to at least try it out. I guess after 24 hours (max.) i'll hopefully notice a difference.
  • DJSilkwormDJSilkworm
    Also if you're having problems with unwanted nekkedness, follow them on Twitter, I got a free shirt (they give them away every so often) :P
  • jason@indieshufflejason@indieshuffle
    This is really interesting. I'm going to test it out. Curious to see how it impacts a blog my size \-:
  • BenMetrojoltBenMetrojolt
    I'm setting this up now, I'll let you know how it works for me.
  • onmyradaronmyradar
    Hmm ... it's been a couple days and I didn't really notice any significant difference in the loading speed of my page. It seemed to load each post page a little faster (but that could've been just my imagination).

    Although, I would still recommend getting this for your site because you get that added security which couldnt hurt.
  • BenMetrojoltBenMetrojolt
    Okay, so when I installed this I did notice a pages loading a little faster by eye, but nothing noteworthy. I used four different website speed checkers to test speed and they all reported slower.



    WARNING:

    The high "security" ened up blocking a ton of traffic. Amoung other things it really f'ed up Shuffler.fm. I noticed a drop of about 1,000-2,000 page views each of the two days I was using this. I have changed my DNS back and don't plan to use Cloudflare.



    It was a good idea but simply isn't built for websites that utilize bots and the like.
  • DJSilkwormDJSilkworm
    Fair enough, like I said my site's tiny and on shitty shared hosting, so the difference was much more tangible for me.

    As far as @Ben's issues go (which I'm sorry to hear about after recommending CloudFlare :/ ) just thought I'd let people know that you can lower the security to low, add IPs etc to a trusted list, and contact their support (which is very good IMHO) about any issues you have.
  • Sean RSean R
    I wonder how this would compare with say, Supercache?
  • DJSilkwormDJSilkworm
    I don't think it's a matter of comparison, I use both a caching plugin (Hyper Cache), and Cloudflare, and I reckon they both benefit the speed of my site, and certainly don't slow it down, so no reason not to use both.
  • tianatiana
    supercache seems faster to me than running both or cloudflare
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