Cloudflare Reviews

We are a reseller of CDN solutions and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

I also use Cloudflare for various websites. It is a content delivery platform.

The most valuable feature is the web application firewall.

The dashboard is very easy to use. It is simple to explain and a layperson can achieve good results.

The performance is good.

There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers.

Another problem with this product, as a reseller, is that your customer needs to give you access to all of the features before you can help them. This is different than with other vendors, where you have insight into the customer's contract. Unless the customer gives me access to their dashboard, I am totally blind and cannot really support them. The problem is that it makes it difficult to give them support. There should at least be a read-only view of the data so that resellers can properly support the clients.

Essentially, the dashboard is not well set up for resellers. Resellers need to have a dashboard view of all of their accounts.

I have been working with Cloudflare for about two years.

It has had some flaws in the past. For example, I think that they had two outages last year and they had a dashboard outage this year, but apart from these instances, it's quite stable.

The scalability is great. They're expanding and have enough resources worldwide.

Our customers are typically enterprise-level organizations.

The technical support team is very good and they know what they're doing.

I am also familiar with Akamai and Fastly. Cloudflare is easier to manage than the solutions provided by these vendors. The user experience is much more straightforward and appeals to a lot of developers.

Akamai, however, is the largest and most popular CDN. It's a very sturdy solution. They basically made this industry, 20 years ago, paving the way for newest vendors such as Cloudflare.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You need to know something about DNS domains and so forth, but if you're familiar with setting up a website then it's straightforward. The deployment takes about 15 minutes.

My customers generally have three or four in-house people to handle the deployment.

There seems to be no official pricelist for enterprise-level customers and it is more of a trial-and-error estimation. The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization. 

We have some customers who cannot afford to have a downtime of an hour, so the customer has to choose. We give them other options, such as Akamai CDN, who provide a 100% SLA and they haven't failed in 17 years. That's a different clientele. Younger startups sometimes break things by pushing out new applications and they're used to having a more fragile environment.

This product is well-developed and they are expanding into other spaces.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls. It's also more automated. You can have a website injected with SQL command. We put in an SQL injection and Cloudflare rejects it. 

It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration. 

I have been using it for three months. 

It's stable but we have to finetune it. We need to adjust the configuration more to meet the requirements for our website. 

It is scalable. My company deploys it for end-users and in the meantime, I deployed it on my own website. 

I haven't contacted technical support. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. There is a button with an explanation. We deployed it within minutes. It has an SQL database and it only took minutes to apply it on the website. 

Try to deploy it on your website and test it on your site to see how it works. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

It already has a good feature set, I don't think it needs anything else. To make it a ten, the documentation should be simplified. 

We use this solution for security.

This solution has improved the security of our organization.

The most valuable feature is the access limiter. It allows you to control the number of request per minute.

The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage. For example, there is no support in Taiwan.

My impression is that this product is stable.

The technical support is good.

The setup was ok, but the deployment took a long time.

I have a lot of people on my team.

The licensing costs for this solution are on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.

We evaluated products from Capsula, and some security products in China.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My primary use for the Cloudflare service is for load balancing. I also use the product to manage the connection to my web server's backend.

Cloudflare improved my organization because my servers used to have a lot of traffic. We put it on the public settings and now it's quite nice because there is no downtime, if there is a slow connection or a lot of web traffic.

The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution.

Compared to other products, Cloudflare is very stable.

For our websites, it is only around 100 to 1000 visitors per day. For the deployment and maintenance of Cloudflare, just one person is required for maintenance. 

The customer support at Cloudflare is fairly straightforward. For technical support, I give Cloudflare a thumbs up for their documentation. We didn't have to ask their technicians or their support in order to finish up the setup. It was easy to troubleshoot our installation.

We used a previous combination of CloudFlare and a manual router with a load balancer. The solution that would be most comparable with CloudFlare based on my experience would be physical load balancing and cloud-based load balancing.

Cloudflare is not complicated to set up. It is fairly straightforward. Deployment times depend on the website. Because I already read the documentation before the first setup, it actually took no more than 10 minutes. I did it all by myself.

We are still using the free version of Cloudflare. It is a yearly based plan.

In my experience, Cloudflare is a great solution. If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag.

I believe that Cloudflare is okay as it is now because they are partnering with Google. Cloudflare improves performance on my websites. It is a great partner for cloud infrastructure for anyone who wants to use the security service and other features.

I would rate Cloudflare with an eight out of ten. I know they are constantly improving.

I just switched to Cloudflare as my domain registrar. That led me to use their CDN service, and I will probably use them for SSL when that is available. 

Cloudflare has made management of my website much easier by combining various functions in one platform without compromising quality. There are also less dark UX patterns than other vendors, so I have peace of mind knowing they aren't trying to trick me or make complicated procedures to attempt to lock me into their service. That is very refreshing!

The dashboard is very well thought out, giving useful information and providing easy access to useful functionality I wasn't aware of.

This is a very minor thing since I can't think of many ways for them to improve: It looks like they don't support as many TLDs as other registrars, but since they are very new as a registrar, I expect this may improve soon. For example, there are many TLDs in this list, but /co is missing: https://www.cloudflare.com/tld...

This solution has been stable so far, and monitoring of Cloudflare has shown them to be reliable.

So far, scalability has done well, but I am not a heavy user.

I haven't contacted support which indicates a good self-serve product. The tools to answer your own questions are there, so support is built-in without ever needing to reach a person. 

I switched to Cloudflare from GoDaddy because Cloudflare promoted "at cost" domains. 

The initial setup was very straightforward.

Self-managed.

Less cost for domains and more satisfaction which is hard to put a dollar value to.

Cost for all services I have researched in Cloudflare is straightforward, and they don't include hidden fees. I'm not a heavy CDN user since I don't get much traffic, so I can't speak too much about the value for their CDN.

I've used various solutions like full hosting companies (Bluehost, iPage, etc.) and most recently GoDaddy. I also looked at Google domains and Namecheap. 

I encourage anyone interested in holistic internet service delivery solutions to check out Cloudflare. They have nice simple solutions that work well together, are easy to set up, and their UI/UX is intuitive.

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.

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.

These are some of the valuable features:

• Free 15 year SSL certificates (I used to need to pay for these).
• Spam protection to help prevent spam and unnecessary bot traffic.
• Edge caching on a CDN. This is nice for WordPress sites. I can get away without caching static content on origin servers.
• Helps increase security as a reverse proxy.

Once a domain's name servers have been pointed to CloudFlare, you never have to worry about DNS propagation. This would be the case, for example, if you wanted to point a domain to a different EC2/digital ocean instance.

In that sense, it's marketing that could use some improvement. It is hard to call your own product a "necessity", but I truly believe that it, or something like it, is a necessity. Without it, you are risking higher costs, more spam, more failures, and less satisfied customers. They need to convince non-technical people why it's so awesome.

CloudFlare solves a lot of problems that many non-technical people don't even know exist. In addition to the obvious ones, like SSL security, spam protection, edge caching across a CDN, you have an easy way for clients to point their domains and DNS management over to CloudFlare.

Here are some scenarios:

• Let's say, down the road, you need to add an email service like Mailgun. You don't need to ask the client to add weird sounding DNS records. You can just add them in CloudFlare. This alone saves hours, if not days, of needless client communication.
• Let's say you need to point to a different server instance and you need to guarantee that the new instance's content is live at exactly 7:57 a.m. EST. Just point CloudFlare to the new instance and clear its cache at that time.
• Let’s say you need to create a stage environment.  You can add the DNS record and point that to wherever you'd like.
• I have found that clients prefer to own their own domain names, and give developers full server access. With CloudFlare, you can do just that while maintaining access to the domain's DNS records to be better able to do your job.

Another reason it's awesome is that you don't need your server to handle every request. Most of the traffic is to static resources and will be served by CloudFlare. This provides incredible peace of mind for higher traffic sites.

If your site has almost no static content, and is configured to auto-scale server instances based on demand, CloudFlare is still a relief because you will know that you are not paying for bad traffic.

Without CloudFlare, if some bot decides to send spam requests every day to your site, you'd likely pay for that traffic in one way or another.

We have used this solution for about two years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The installation was complex until I learned what I had to learn. Once you learn about domains, DNS, name servers, propagation, and web server management, CloudFlare is simple. Before you learn, it's quite hard to understand and debug DNS and configuration issues.

For example, I was once trying to SSH into the domain instead of an instance's IP address. It took me forever to understand why it was not going to work.

I recommend the free plan for most users.

Ask for guidance from someone who has done it before.

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.

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.

• DNS setup: Their DNS allows you to move control over DNS from your own server to a third party. This allows you to avoid running DNS locally that might consume resources or become unavailable if something happens with your local DNS server.
• DDoS protection: DDoS protection is what CloudFlare is known for. They are known to prevent DDoS attacks from taking down your server.
• Distributed content delivery (CDN): Their content delivery network is also a nice feature which can keep a website accessible even if your webserver goes down.

The setup and configuration is also easy to perform and their support is excellent.

This product has kept the site up while under an attack.

None that I can think of at this point. Their enterprise-level DDoS mitigation plans are costly but they are cost effective compared to any on-premises/distributed solutions that can go upwards of high six figures to implement. If a company like Sony can be taken offline for a week due to an attack, then there is not much that can be done by midsized/startups to prevent these attacks. For these companies, CloudFlare is ideal.

I have used it for five years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. You can move up to bigger packages if you are under a heavy DDoS attack.

Technical support is excellent.

I did not previously use a different solution. This was the first CDN company I have used.

Initial setup was simple enough for novices. They have plenty of documentation on their site.

Start off with their free plan. However, major DDoS protection is only provided with their paid plans. I would start with the free plan to test or to simply move DNS off your local server to them to free up resources.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. They are an industry leader in CDN.

If you need your website accessible at all times, consider going with them.

I have used the cache feature of CloudFlare CDN.

CloudFlare is very easy to set up for my site domain.

It is very easy to maintain.

CloudFlare flushes the cache immediately, which is not supported by some of the other CDN networks such as Akamai and Amazon CloudFront. These CDNs take some time that can vary between 5-15 minutes (minimum).

No comments, because I am using it only for creating a cache flushing tool that will work on Adobe Experience Manger (AEM).

There are some features missing or might not be visible to me as I am using its free website plan. These features are:

• CloudFlare doesn't provide the cache flush history. I.e., I am not able to find out the URL information of those I have recently flushed. It makes me uncomfortable when I work in a multiple-author environment and they all have cache-flushing rights.
• It doesn't support a wildcard (*) as some of its competitors support; for example, Amazon CloudFront supports (*) annotation for flushing the complete content tree.
• CloudFlare also does not have any API as some of its rivals provide, such as Amazon CloudFront.

I have used it for the last 10 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I don't need any technical supports because there are a number of blogs with solutions for most of the problems. Because of these blogs, I haven’t used this feature until now, so I’m not able to rate this feature.

Before using CloudFlare, I used Amazon CloudFront and Akamai.

I used CloudFlare because I was creating a cache flushing tool for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). This tool will be responsible for flushing the cache from different CDN networks, such as Akamai, CloudFront, and CloudFlare.

Initial setup is straightforward and easily configurable, even if a person doesn't have any knowledge of CloudFlare. He/she can easily set up CloudFlare.

I’m not able to comment on this because I am using the free website plan.

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

In my opinion, CloudFlare is one of the best CDN networks I have ever used. It provides a quick flushing feature that is not supported in some of other popular CDN networks such as Akamai and CloudFront. CloudFlare is a very easy-to-use CDN as compared to others.

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.

Highly-configurable caching options is what sells this product. Having CloudFlare properly render every page has reduced load times, bandwidth usage, and, most importantly, our server's load. Reducing the load meant we were able to get rid of several PHP/Apache caching modules that consumed a great deal of resources that do the same, if not, a less efficient job.

CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security. Also, having servers with data centers located in Germany and the Netherlands, it worked great for our EU customers. However, we couldn't exactly deliver the same load times for clients located outside of EU, for example in Asia. Having our websites cached with CloudFlare's servers all over the world, this is no longer an issue.

I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years.

We've been using it for around two years with its cPanel plugin.
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Luckily, we haven't encountered any issues with stability so far. In fact, it has increased our uptime since it wasn't unusual for us to deal with DoS/DDoS attacks on a weekly basis.

Since we are on the same plan since the first day we started with CloudFlare, we haven't had much experience with scalability.

Since customer service goes hand in hand with technical support, I'm afraid we haven't experienced their representatives going above and beyond in terms of:

• Responses within the SLA
• Not using predefined answers for issues that were somewhat "unique"

I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we reported over the years.

We haven't used CDN networks, but we experimented with Varnish, xCache, Gzip, eAccelerator and other PHP/Apache caching solutions. Since they weren't very configurable (except for Varnish), CloudFlare has provided a much better solution, allowing us to move away from running multiple caching instances on our local servers.

With every service out there, there will be hiccups every now, and then but as far as the deployment goes Cloudflare is extremely simple to implement. It is a low-risk solution since we can manipulate which DNS zones get cached and which don't. In case there's any trouble, we can disable CloudFlare, and switch to our local DNS in less than a couple of minutes.

Setting up CloudFlare is an easy gig. The only issue you might encounter is having your domain registered through a vendor that doesn't allow direct name-server manipulation.
For example, Enom resellers are known to have their domain control interface completely locked, so you have to rely on their support to handle this for you. If their support team has an issue with handling requests within the SLA - you have a problem.

Fortunately, we implemented this directly through CloudFlare as we like to avoid third party resellers whenever possible.

Having several sites that sell products, our primary concern is:

• Content deliverability
• High availability
• Fast response times

Since CloudFlare provided a solution for all the above, which indirectly affects and improves our business, our ROI has greatly increased.

The fact that CloudFlare offers a free solution, which is more than enough if you're running a low-medium traffic is just amazing. As far the pricing goes, although it's a bit pricey, it offers great value if you're running your entire business online. Content optimization and delivery is key, and CloudFlare does a great job on providing that.

CloudFlare was the first CDN we used, and luckily, we haven't been given a reason to use another solution. In the past, we used server-based software, caching modules, etc.

Since it's a low-risk implementation, I encourage all users that have issues with their response times, occasional DOS attacks and page rendering to give CloudFlare a go.

The most important feature is that they handle the basics of security matters automatically.

Honestly the product has not really improved the way of my organisation. I just let the product take care of my security in term of networking attacks, but this is not a magic product. You still have to take care of other security matters which are important in network administration.

The only thing that I think about is that CloudFlare supercharges your website, as your dedicated IP is covered behind their server. Then, if you are a target of a network attack, they will handle the traffic, and the load, then mitigate the attack. However, depending on how your network system is built if, by any chance, your main IP address is seen by attackers they can easily bypass Cloudflare and directly target your server. In that case, you need to add extra filtering directly onto your dedicated server to avoid breaches out of CloudFlare cover, or add extra anti-DDOS solutions directly onto your dedicated server.

I've used this solution for one year. Unfortunately, I'll stop it this month as, rather than being unsatisfied, my needs have changed, and my website no has longer the same traffic. I think that I can (as a System Administrator) handle the security side without it for a while.

Yes I did at the beginning, since I did not understand properly how to install the solution on my NGINX servers. I guess it was a lack of knowledges, but also a problem of speed, since I had to implement the solution in a chaotic atmosphere, since I was under attack at the time and had never faced this before, so I was not prepared.

I have not encountered any issues with CloudFlare so far. The solution has worked pretty well, but there are a couple of things which are linked to a webserver environment (NGINX in my case) that you have to be careful about when setting up. Otherwise, you may get some errors, but once the webserver is installed with CloudFlare, it should work like a charm.

Scalability is not a problem for CloudFlare since they are a cloud based solution. I think I had the biggest year for my service in 2014, in terms of traffic. My website was spread over two servers, with CloudFlare on top of them, and everything went well.

9/10. I did not really have the opportunity to use their service as a free user. However, when you are a paying user at CloudFlare, they will answer you very quickly, and with accurate answers. I did contact them on a few occasions, and they gave me good answers.

9/10. I did not really have the opportunity to use their service as a free user. However, when you are a paying user at CloudFlare, they will answer you very quickly, and with accurate answers. I did contact them on a few occasions, and they gave me good answers.

I did not, perhaps I had to, in order to be a little bit more objective about this kind of product, but since I implemented CloudFlare, I have been happy with them.

I'll say that you have to be used to managed webservers such as Apache or NGINX. It's pretty straightforward, but you have to take care with some configuration details. If you do it incorrectly, it could make your website temporarily unavailable sometimes.

I first paid for the Business plan, which was 200$/month for the first month when I had those big issues with DDOS. Then I went to the 20$/month plan. In other words, I spent about 400$ more or less on the product. I have not had a DDOS attack, since, or at least not become unavailable due to DDOS which means my ROI is pretty good. I mean when your website is offline, you first lose money like daily revenue, around 400$ for us, but you also lose your customer loyalty, and there are many more issues. No matters what's going on (attacks or not) a website must be online at all time.

In my opinion the Pro plan 20$/month is the best solution. It includes the core features of CloudFlare which is pretty much enough. If you do not have SSL, you can also use the free plan, which is almost exactly the same as Pro, just without the SSL support. The free plan has SSL support, but it does only support modern web browsers. This means that some of your customers may not reach your website if you are using SSL with a free plan.

I did not evaluate other options.

Prepare your implementation while making tests in a pre-production environment. Do not let CloudFlare take care of everything, you still have to take care of security matters for your services.

1. CDN
2. Security

One of my projects, ancient-origins.net, gets 3 million views per month, so serving the page fast is an important element. Using the CDN of Cloudflare improved the speed significantly, reducing the page loading times to appropriate levels. Additionally their security features make sure to block attacks on our site.

Their CDN features, although good, still lack in speed in comparison to their competitors (e.g. Incapsula, MaxCDN, etc.).

I've been using it for almost one year.

No issues with the deployment. Their process is pretty simple and fast.

Yes, there were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side. Also, many times, even if our server is working properly, Cloudflare would report it as being down.

No scalability issues so far.

I would give them a 9/10. They respond pretty fast to requests.

I would give an 8/10 to their technical support. We haven’t had many issues, but when we do, it appears that sometimes they are not willing to look deeper into them to try and find a solution.

We used MaxCDN, but we switched to Cloudflare because MaxCDN lacks security features.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require any technical knowledge, since everything is done on their site.

The implementation was done in-house, since it is a simple process.

This is difficult to calculate; however, improving the page loading speed always impacts the traffic on a site positively.

The original setup cost was zero, and the monthly cost is around $30 for three sites using the Business Cloudflare plan.

We evaluated MaxCDN and Incapsula.

If your budget is low, then Cloudflare is the only cost effective solution, at least to begin with. The best combination of CDN and security features at a low price. At a slightly higher budget, Incapsula may be a better solution especially since they provide a faster CDN and better security features.

The aggressive caching and DDOS mitigation are the most valuable features offered by Cloudflare. Website traffic analytics and threat insights are also very useful.

Utilizing Cloudflare allows us to deploy websites using less hardware due to their caching and helps us serve pages to our customers more quickly and efficiently.

More insight into analytics and threats would be a good place to start improving cloudflare. Also less 501 and 504 errors would be good too.

I've used Cloudflare since 2012 and am currently using the latest version. I've utilized it with several different websites successfully.

No issues encountered.

Only the occasional network issues, some in 2013, where all Cloudflare customers were affected, but much less lately.

No issues encountered.

Good, as the few times I've required customer service, it was more technical but they were always helpful in directing me to the people I needed to speak to.

Excellent. The representatives are knowledgeable and online documentation is great.

Cloudflare was the first service of this type I've used.

It was very easy to get setup on Cloudflare. They have made it even easier recently, and all that needs to be done is to enter your DNS records into their interface and the configuration is done.

We implemented it in-house.

Setup cost was zero and currently we are using the $20 a month plan. I've used the business tier in the past which costs $200 a month.

I don't know of other vendors who offer a comparable service.

I would recommend that you use it. It has been very useful and well worth the cost to me over the last three years.

The speed improvements / CDN caching / Railgun.

Because our website is blazing fast it improves our conversion rates.

More than one year

We experienced some downtime in the fall of 2013, causing us to switch to Incapsula. That was a bad decision, because Incapsula is much slower.