CloudFlare - Experiences?

paulstar

Does anyone have a view on CloudFlare? It is supposed to speed up website response time. My website hoster has made the free version available. I tried it and the ping time went UP from 150ms to 650ms!

However, just been reading that this is not a good measure of end user "time to fully rendered page" - which should be faster with CloudFlare despite the ping time.

Pure speculation, but maybe CloudFlare works best for large webpages - the compression speeding delivery time? My webpages are small.

Would be interested in views and experiences.

paddyrg

I am not sure it's so much to do with compression as it is with local points of presence - effectively a CDN that refers back to your site as the master. If you have a lot of international visitors it might mean they see the site faster, too, especially the static content. Dynamic pages (where the whole page changes eg php, not Ajax) would still need to be served via them from the original site, so may actually be slower.

Or maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick, but that's how I understand their offering. The real value is for international/higher-volume sites who may need their DDOS protection.

securityguy

paulstar wrote: »

Does anyone have a view on CloudFlare? It is supposed to speed up website response time. My website hoster has made the free version available. I tried it and the ping time went UP from 150ms to 650ms!

Ping Time has little to do with web page rendering time. For a start off, a lot of firewalls and routers respond to ICMP echo requests at a very low priority and rate limit how often they send ICMP echo responses, so the ping time has only a weak relationship to real round trip times. And round trip times aren't hugely related to page rendering times either.

paulstar

paddyrg wrote: »

The real value is for international/higher-volume sites who may need their DDOS protection.

Thanks for the replies.

The site only has static content, mostly UK traffic and small pages too. DDOS is unlikely to be a problem.

So it sounds as if there is little or no advantage to using CloudFlare. There again, given that it's free, no disadvantage so maybe I will switch it back on again.

paddyrg

paulstar wrote: »

Thanks for the replies.

The site only has static content, mostly UK traffic and small pages too. DDOS is unlikely to be a problem.

So it sounds as if there is little or no advantage to using CloudFlare. There again, given that it's free, no disadvantage so maybe I will switch it back on again.

I looked at it for my site, and came to the conclusion that there was no benefit for similar reasons

The other use, one that attracts nefarious users to cloud flare, is that it hides the origin of your pages/site, making it hard for people to tell where a server or service is located. Again, of no use to me!

paulstar

I'm resurrecting this thread to see if anyone has any current experience of CloudFlare.

I have tried it on and off for the past several months and it seems to reduce the bandwidth traffic to my website. I presume this is because some users will be getting my pages from a CloudFlare server with no need to get it from my webhoster's server?

paddyrg

Yep, that's how they stop DDOS (well, part of it).