Cloudflare Reviews

I am a paid Cloudflare customer. The service has been wonderful. As in all services, there is a setup that is required and a learning curve.

One of the biggest reasons for me to implement it was to reduce server load. My forums keep growing and to reduce the need to keep upgrading, we tried Cloudflare.

It has reduced my bandwidth and server load immensely. For example, my bandwidth dropped from 45GB/month to 10GB/month. Server hits went from 3.5 million/month to 600 thousand/month.

Cloudflare is setup if the server does not respond timely, then your users will see an error message. This is an indication of a slow server versus a Cloudflare issue.

Who's the culprit- Cloudflare or hosting?

When I have seen the CloudFlare error screen for site is unavailable, it has always been due to slow response on the webserver. (validated by using a series of http responders hitting CloudFlare and the webserver directly over a 60 day period.)

One of the keys is to make sure your hosting provider is using the CloudFlare extension and they have listed all the CloudFlare servers within your firewall settings. All your traffic will come from only a couple of IPs. If your server and firewalls are not setup to support this concept, they will trip DDOS or Flooding rules.

Yes, I’m obsessive about Webpage load speed. Only in the past year or so has Website speed become an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) factor however I’ve always spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to speed up my Website (as well as find ways to speed up all Websites I build for clients). Until a few short years back, besides using state of the art software and hardware (NGINX, Ubuntu Server, reverse HTTP proxies etc.) in addition to a CDN (Content Delivery Network) such as Amazon Web Services CloudFront, there really wasn’t any simple means of speeding up WordPress Websites.

How times have changed in a few short years! We now have super awesome services such as CloudFlare and the Google PageSpeed Service (PageSpeed service isn’t widely available yet but should be soon). CloudFlare is a freemium service and their free offering is probably much more than most Websites need. As for Google PageSpeed Service, pricing hasn’t been provided as yet and is being used free on an invite only basis at present (thanks Google for the invite you sent me ).

Just over two months ago I started using the PageSpeed service for three of my other Websites. Around the same time I started using CloudFlare Pro (a paid-for service) for this Website, OrganicWeb.com.au. Here are my findings.

Using WordPress on CloudFlare

How the CloudFlare free plan can remain free is quite simply amazing. The benefits, from free use of a leading CDN, free high-performance DNS hosting to security and more is awesome. The majority of users won’t need to upgrade to the Pro plan which has a monthly cost and offers further performance and security enhancements.

I used the Pro plan for a couple of months but I actually moved my Website from CloudFlare to PageSpeed a few weeks back as there were problems when people were leaving comments on Posts (I use the JetPack Plugin to manage commenting). I believe that Blog commenting is important and no matter what configuration I did, I just couldn’t correct the commenting problem when on CloudFlare so moved to PageSpeed (and the commenting problem no longer seems to occur). In fairness to CloudFlare I believe that the problem may well have been with the JetPack Plugin.

Just because my WordPress Site had problems on CloudFlare doesn’t mean that yours will. In fact, I recommend CloudFlare over PageSpeed for users that want a very simple to setup service that works well. CloudFlare have done a great job in making the setup super simple; just install and activate the WordPress CloudFlare Plugin, add necessary data to CloudFlare and your WordPress Site will be secured and delivered by CloudFlare in just a few minutes.

Using WordPress on Google PageSpeed Service

Oh … My … Goodness. Google PageSpeed ROCKS! A little more complicated to setup than CloudFlare but wow is this service great for delivering WordPress content mighty fast. PageSpeed does clever stuff such as convert images, where beneficial, to base64 as well as write CSS and JavaScript inline into the HTML in order to reduce round trip times. Like CloudFlare, once PageSpeed has been setup then it just works.

The Google PageSpeed Service may be a bit too technical for those wanting something very simple to setup. Whilst CloudFlare provides top-class and very fast DNS hosting, Google PageSpeed doesn’t provide this. I prefer having a separate DNS hosting provider and use AWS Route 53 so PageSpeed is preferable for me.

Security versus Speed

The biggest selling point for most people however will likely be the security provided by CloudFlare. I’m really not sure if PageSpeed provides any security and whether the security provided by CloudFlare is any good. Security is often a perception and CloudFlare beats PageSpeed completely where the perception of security matters.

My advise for most people is to use CloudFlare. For more advanced users, and those that are confident managing their own security, the Google PageSpeed Service is the way to go.

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What other advice do I have?

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?