Cloudflare Reviews

CloudFlare offers some of the most amazing features when it comes to optimizing websites & for its security for free, and all at the domain level. They were able to truly disrupt the market because prior to them, only enterprises had access to such features. They offer free CDN to all websites.

These are the following features that I use all the time:

• Content delivery network: CloudFlare caches all the static resources such as JavaScript & CSS on their servers and delivers them to the website visitors directly from their server. Because their network is spread across the world, it takes much less time to deliver these resources, thus improving the page load time, user experience and it saves bandwidth for the server too, in turn saving few hundred dollars/year and all for free.
• Security: They offer basic security features at all levels, including the free ones. However, with each plan, the level of security differs. The free plan is less aggressive in terms of security, but does a pretty decent job considering that it offers Captcha to website visitors if they feel threatened. This ensures that only humans or real traffic passes to the website and not the automated bots. It also offers web application firewall & DDoS protection, although they are available only for paid accounts.
• DNS zone manager: Because CloudFlare offers all of the optimization & security features at the domain level, it offers an excellent interface to manage DNS records. It's fast, intuitive and makes DNS management pretty easy. I manage more than 100 domains and I find no issues while managing everything.
• Flexible SSL: One of the best features of CloudFlare is that it offers a flexible certificate for all plans. That means, even if the webserver doesn't have an SSL certificate, CloudFlare enables webmasters to deliver resources over SSL.
• Page rules: Page rules give you the ability to take various actions based on the page's URL, such as creating redirects, fine tuning caching behavior, or enabling and disabling their various services. The plan level decides how many page rules you can create; the free plan provides three page rules and personally I've never had to use more than that. Using these rules, I implement flexible SSL on all my & my clients’ websites. Furthermore, it allows you to do much more than that.

As mentioned, it helps me manage DNS records for more than 100 domains with ease. It helps in web page optimization & helps keep the website secure. If it was not for CloudFlare, I would have to hire a dedicated resource to manage all this for me. However, not even couple of hours a week on CloudFlare helps me offer fast & secure websites to my clients mostly for free or at a very minimal cost.

CloudFlare is an innovative company and certainly the thought leaders in their industry. They're constantly improving their product, releasing new features, partnering with various service providers to offer add-ons. Personally, I think they're ahead of the competition and keep it that way by improving faster than the competition too.

However, what I still fail to understand is that why aren't they offering domains themselves. I'd love to buy the domain name directly from them rather than buying it from other registrars and then connecting them through CloudFlare.

I have used it since 2010; that's about 6 years. They were named as best startup at TechCrunch Disrupt and since then, I've been a user.

They've always informed me in advance about any maintenance and, personally, I haven't seen anything going wrong.

I have not encountered any scalability issues at all.

I’ve never had a reason to get in touch with their technical support.

I was using MaxCDN for content delivery network services, but have never looked back as CloudFlare offers the same feature for free.

CloudFlare is very intuitive and the setup has been straightforward from the beginning.

Most small businesses should be good with their free plan. However, as website traffic & business grows, I think one should invest in their paid plans. It's worth every single penny.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Use the page rules and flexible SSL, for sure. If you have an e-commerce portal, then implement the full SSL support.

It's very user-friendly. A user who doesn't completely know how everything works can easily sign up and have an account. 

It is very clear and the information is very useful.

There is a very good reporting system for statistics.

There are some issues with the CDN services.

Also, the connection could be improved.

There are some issues with stability. We have connection issues.

We are satisfied with technical support.

We don't have any issues with the price.

I would rate Cloudflare an eight out of ten.

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.

DNS Management is the most valuable feature of the product on the free plan, and the CDN options are robust on the business plan.

It offers single-point DNS management for all of the company’s domains that might be registered with different registrars.

Refreshing the site cache is very fast and easy, and the developers mode is also a great feature.

With CDN loads, sometimes we get an error that the host server is unavailable when the connection between CloudFlare and the server timed out. But now, we get the always online page, so the customer hardly notices a problem.

I have been using it for at least four years.

no issues, very fast to deploy. a simple change of the domain's NS records.

on the free plan we used to receive from time to time "website not available" but since we switched to the business plan, we encounter no problems.

No problems with scalability; we moved from free to pro to business with no problem.

Technical support is 10/10 – very good.

We are simultaneously using Akamai, which is sometimes too robust for us, much harder to configure and costs a lot more. CloudFlare is very user friendly, UX-wise and price-wise.

Initial setup is very straightforward.

We implemented through an in-house implementer.

If you are mid-size company, go straight to the business plan. great ROI.

We are also using AKAMAI, see my previous comment on that.

CloudFlare provides an answer to a variety of issues, so it gives you very high value for your money.

If you are not sure, take it for a test run; it’s free.

DDoS protection is this product’s most valuable feature. Even if it can’t handle very large-scale attacks, protection is easier having CloudFlare as a primary shield.

If you choose to do so, you can use their DNS servers. Because DNS amplification is also a vector of attack, this is one more optional feature you can delegate to CloudFlare at no additional cost.

It allows us to have a backup in case Incapsula has issues.

I would like to not need a separate server for non-www redirection under the CNAME setup option. With Incapsula, they simply tell me to point the non-www records to the servers they tell me and they take care of the non-www redirection. In CloudFlare's case, I need to get an external server, set up the redirection there using Apache or NGINX and put my own SSL certificates there.

I have used it for one year.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

We previously used pretty much all solutions. In some cases, Incapsula is better; in others, CloudFlare is.

We were used to the CNAME setup. Initially, this was not offered but now it is. The only issue is handling the non-www redirections that, with CNAME setup, requires us to use an external server. (Incapsula does not.)

Pricing and licensing is standard when compared to its competitors.

Don’t hesitate to contact support; they answer very quickly.

In addition to a reliable and easy to use a DNS service, Cloudflare enables us to host websites on hardware in-house, by protecting us against DDoS attacks as well as from our slightly unreliable ISP. 

Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations.

• DNS
• Round robin DNS
• Load balancing
• DDOS protection

to protect us from botnets and attackers, as we are hosting sites in-house.

Cloudflare is one service that has been absent of any frustration when setting up or using. Perhaps I would ask that they improve the Free plan and allow us to use it with any TLD (certain ones are not allowed).

 No

No

Very straightforward, we were set up in minutes.

I'd rate it a 10 out of 10. There is no service as mature as Cloudflare that is also as easy to use, reliable, and hosted from excellent infrastructure.