Cloudflare to speed up your sites!

[prosperent brian]

It's not every day that I come across a service that really blows my mind. Cloudflare is one such service.


Would you like to decrease bandwidth useage, increase site performance, stop malicious attacks, have the power of a CDN that delivers all of your static images, compress all of your javascript, and keep your sites online even if your server is down?

Yeah, of course you do.

Best part? It's COMPLETELY free, and you don't have to change or configure a single thing on your server or domain. You just change your dns to their dns servers. Their system works by modifying packets of data at the tcp stack level, so you don't have to do anything on your end. You can completely configure and control which features are enabled or disabled. There are no bandwidth limitations or resource limitations. If you need additional features they have inexpensive packages you can subscribe to, but from what I can see, the free plan is good for just about everyone.

Seriously, check it out. I'm in no way affiliated with them, just amazed by their technology.

http://www.cloudflare.com

[prosperent brian]

http://community.prosperent.com/show...dflare-Support

Update to pass proper ip to Prosperent.

[Hoops]

I've been using them for about 6 weeks and definitely have noticed an improvement in responsiveness on my sites and possibly even an increase in traffic as a result.

There is also an apache mod that you can install which makes sure your analytics are accurate at the IP level.

[prosperent brian]

Thanks for posting that mod.

I just moved the prosperent image servers over to cloudflare as a test. Definitely interested in seeing how their CDN impacts the serving of images. If that goes well i'll slowly add other prosperent services to their system.

[Hoops]

No problem.

Another caveat for anyone using ZB Block: I noticed it blocking cloudflare IPs and therefore traffic, so you may want to look into that in your logs. After I installed mod_cloudflare there were no issues.

[prosperent brian]

Have you tried running the built in traffic/security tools at cloudflare instead of ZB Block? Just curious. I know the guys are from project honeypot, so they should have a pretty significant amount of data.

[Hoops]

I have and still a good bit gets through (baidu, etc.). zaphod of ZB Block is very skeptical of them actually. I do like the idea of pulling that extra layer of php calls though to see what level of performance I can hit.

Have you tried running the built in traffic/security tools at cloudflare instead of ZB Block? Just
curious. I know the guys are from project honeypot, so they should have a pretty significant amount of data.

[prosperent brian]

You might use both together in that case. Block the majority with cloudflare, then catch the rest with zb block. Saves on quite a bit of processing at least.

[bigshell]

I know everyone has different experiences and opinions, but I got this a while back from someone who has been in the business a while and whose opinions I (generally) trust.

My biggest concern with cloudflare is it will shut people out and it goes down from time to time. I have had instances where people couldn't access some of my sites for 2-3 days as Cloudflare's different DNS servers were down. That is no way to run a business. So I switched to using the minification properties inside W3 Total Cache and I use MaxCDN for almost all my sites...

Maybe things there are better than they used to be and I might be willing to use it with some non-critcal sites but I don't think I'm ready to trust my business to them.

[enzeder]

I used them some time ago when they were reasonably new, and experienced quite a bit of downtime, but as above i'm sure they have evolved and moved on from those days.