Cloudflare Reviews

I use this for DNS for many of my former clients and personal sites. When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers. 

The second major use case is as a CDN where I will push logic to the edge for caching and redirects.

I have not used it at my current organization, but in the past I have used it to bring enterprise-grade features to my small business clients at low or no cost.

Centralized, full-featured DNS.

Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript.

They also lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem.

There has been some downtime over the years, but it was usually handled well.

I have only scaled this to a few million viewers with a couple TB of traffic, but I didn’t see any issues.

I have mainly been on their lower accounts which don’t really come with support.

I have used a couple of different solutions like Incapsula, CloudFront, and Akamai, but for different projects, not before or after.

It is very easy for someone who knows DNS. It is somewhat opinionated and pushes you into higher tiers, but overall it is easy.

You can get a lot out of the lower accounts. 

I have used several in the space and I still use, Route 53, DynDNS, etc.

This product is good for simple things, but you may need other tools for more fine-grained control of specific portions.

I work as the Senior SEO Strategist on a very small in-house team of digital marketers for Lakeview Health, a drug and alcohol rehab. Upon starting my role, one of my first tasks was migrating our websites to a new web hosting provider so that we could take ownership of them. With all our sites developed in WordPress, I decided on hosting with WP Engine which recommended Cloudflare in the setup process. 

In the past, I worked in environments where the developers and IT team managed the websites, so I admit that there are gaps of knowledge in my understanding of how the internet works. Using Cloudflare made the process of migrating much easier and gave me the satisfaction of knowing we’d receive enhanced security features, alongside a reputable CDN, simple DNS hosting, and the many other solutions Cloudflare offers.

I manage these websites independently within my organization and, with exception of a third-party vendor, I am the only one that has access to our Cloudflare account. It helps me ensure the sites are running optimally and securely.

The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules.

I will say, in the years I have used Cloudflare, one thing I love is the constant improvements and developments being made.

One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country.

I would rate Cloudflare a nine out of 10. I haven’t used any other solutions that might compete with Cloudflare, so I am a bit biased, but for ease of use, features, and cost effectiveness, I think it’s a great solution.

For DDOS mitigation.

Provides peace of mind. We do not have to do things over and over, or double check their work, or worry about what could have happened due to a potential DDOS attack, if we didn't have protection.

Convenient

Ease of deployment

I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution.

Also, the reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

I can't say, since we actually just deployed it. Our organization has already grown. For now, it serves our needs and manages are our expansion.

I'm quite comfortable with them so I don't see a big issue. We get fairly good support. The earlier issues that we had, some minor issues here and there, we got them resolved. They resolve our issues in a timely manner.

I think any DDOS solution is going to be complex. But we could actually follow the process and implement the solution. So it was not that complex, in that sense. And the tech support was there to provide feedback and support.

We didn't get any training other than you reading up materials and working with tech support.

I think the pricing is competitive.

I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers.

We did review a couple of options, Tenable and a couple of others. We settled on Cloudflare because of price, support, and of course comfort in dealing with a vendor that was supporting us.

My advice would be to review exactly what you need and talk to different people to understand the potential advantages and pitfalls of implementing these kinds of solutions. Then identify the right product to meet your requirements.

From a solution perspective and from a product perspective I would give Cloudflare an eight out of 10. It's a reasonably priced solution that meets customers' needs and it's not too difficult to deploy.

- DNS Management

- CDN

- Page rules

- Easier DNS management via API

- Easier http to https redirect using page rules

Several features that I think is essential is not available in the free and business package. One of them is multi users. Multi users and multi API key is important for organizations in any size.

2-3 years

Initial setup is straightforward and guided by Cloudflare. NS changes for new site is easy. For existing NS migrated to Cloudflare, user must recheck current DNS records to ensure all records already available in Cloudflare.

So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed.

The API gives us the ability to remote control our DNS settings. With many platforms, such as PF-Sense integrating with CloudFlare, it’s an invaluable tool for things such as Dynamic DNS, Let’s Encrypt DNS-01 Challenge, or even as a rapid counter-measure when traffic diversion is needed.

The speed of everything CloudFlare is extreme. The UI is fast, responsive, and updates seem to be pretty much instant. But the biggest benefit, when mentioning speed, is that you can teach anyone in less than 20 minutes how to use it. This even includes your drunken janitor. Try that with AWS.

The Simplicity. When I mention the simplicity, it’s because of the limited information you are presented with at every screen. Although I hate the endless scrolling when searching for a function, I fully understand that less tech-savvy individuals probably have an easier time dealing with less information being thrown at them as they sift through the pile of setting CloudFlare offers. The features, functions, and terminology are also very well and clearly explained, if not almost cut out in cardboard for the reader to understand.

CloudFlare made it easier for us to manage our client’s DNS. With their outstanding UI, we have been able to reduce human errors and get a better overview of our DNS and security.

• We need templates and profiles badly for the whole setup and multi-user support with rights management.
• They need to fix their extensions and integrations faster.
• They need to add more sub-level API keys.

I have used CloudFlare for some twenty months.

We did have stability issues a few times, but it’s hard to tell. They don’t always seem open about disclosing it.

We never had scalability issues.

I rate technical support quite badly. The support person had a hard time understanding my issue.

But to be fair, we gave up on support from major enterprises a long time ago.

Now we don’t even bother. It simply takes too long time to get escalated to Level-1 support where you can have a meaningful conversation.

We had many previous solutions and that’s why we switched.

The setup was super simple, and it still is.

We don’t have advice, since we mostly rely on their free services such as DNS hosting. In general, their pricing is fair, but the price scaling is way too steep. For example, to go from 200 to 5000 dollars does not make any sense at all.

I believe I reviewed Radware for scrubbing and GratisDNS for DNS.

• Never put your eggs in one basket. Make sure that you have a contingency plan for DNS.
• Make sure that you can rapidly move domains off CloudFlare. This can be done with scripting from your existing registrar, or with GoDaddy/CFR/Route53, which is a good triangle for speedy moves.
• Keep an eye on GEO statistics on your important domains and make sure that you are able to provide a quick regional alternative.
• Spread out domains over multiple accounts and different CloudFlare Servers.
• Route53 is a good alternative to CloudFlare.

• Caching: Caching helps save bandwidth with the CloudFlare CDN
• Page rules: Page rules help shape traffic to the appropriate pages.

CloudFlare's caching brings the load speed down from 4.32 seconds to 2.45 seconds.

The Always Online feature has room for improvement. It seems to work sometimes and not others even with the pro version.

The feature shows a cached version of your live site if your host is offline. When your site is offline CloudFlare shows this:

We moved our DNS to CloudFlare about three years ago.

I have not encountered any stability issues; the platform is rock solid.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; moving to the pro version was a simple as a click.

Technical support is 10/10. Our one call about a caching issue was easily fixed and it turned out to be a problem we caused, not CloudFlare.

We used our own name servers and Snort. We switched due to simplicity of the CloudFlare interface.

Initial setup was straightforward. CloudFlare's setup wizards made it easy.

Start with the free plan and move up as needed. It was easy to upgrade and downgrade.

We looked at GoDaddy DNS and Amazon DNS services. After reading the reviews online, we jumped to CloudFlare.

Give it a shot. The setup was easy and you can see the results right away.

• Provides a very easy DNS management: Allows you to create various sub-domains and A-record management
• Handy interface with one-click to switch the service on and off
• Global coverage supports the DNS queries with its load balancing feature
• Helps to secure your web from DDoS attacks and unwanted bots
• Has a very user-friendly interface to handle the allowed IPs if you need to bypass/block any particular region or identified bots.
• Web optimization features such as ‘Automatic Content Caching’, ‘Rocket Loader’, and ‘AutoMinify’, which help to minimize the website loading time and increase the website response.

• We use the DNS management for all of our domains. It brings all websites under the umbrella of CloudFlare.
• We no longer require any other security levels, as all websites under CloudFlare wrappers are secure with DDoS protection.
• We do not need to implement complex caching techniques as the CloudFlare content caching helps to minimize the website load time.

For DDoS protection and website downtime, it would be nice to have a feature to provide email/SMS alerts that can be implemented like Pingdom and other solutions.

I implemented these solutions in 2013.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

Until now, I didn’t require much technical support. I try to find any help by myself through the interface.

I did not use any previous solution. In fact, I searched for a few and selected CloudFlare.

The product is very straightforward and simple to implement. Those are the main reasons for using it.

I haven’t gone through the other pricing plans. For the services I am using, it is a bit expensive. It is worth the price when you weight it against time and cost.

Before selecting CloudFlare, we looked at Amazon products. Although AWS provides a range of services and is a standardized platform, I found CloudFlare to be a much easier and faster solution for websites.

If someone is looking for a secure and optimized wrapper over an open website, I would suggest CloudFlare services. It will instantly help you to secure and optimize websites/web pages or blogs. It is quick, easy to use, and simple to implement.

Easy cache management for pages on a high traffic Drupal site, due to seasonal performance spikes. This service is helpful for our small technical team.

We have specific high-visibility "campaigns" that are scheduled about every six weeks, and the rest of the time our site is quieter. We've used Cloudflare to handle the ability to post dynamic, timebound content as well as more static content delivery.

I think it would be more helpful to have either user-submitted or Cloudflare-produced documentation, samples, or examples of situations. We had to do a lot of digging and back-and-forth with technical support for specific use cases, and it might be helpful to have more screencasts or screenshots for common situations.

I have used the solution for two years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues in the paid version.

Answers to all our questions were available when needed.

The initial setup is extremely easy but will require access to your Domain Name Servers.

The solution is a good choice for sites that require multiple types of users and multiple types of content (e.g. Drupal sites) with thousands, or tens of thousands of users or more.

They have a few introductory screencasts for people just getting started, which is helpful. I've now implemented CloudFlare on three new projects, so for most common cases it is solid and straightforward.