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I've had terrible experiences with cloudflare, a fellow HN user uses it and I constantly have problems connecting to his site (cloudflare telling me it's down)

I've had terrible experiences with cloudflare, a fellow HN user uses it and I constantly have problems connecting to his site (cloudflare telling me it's down) when it's definitely up and accessible by others. I definitely see the value in their product (idea) though.

sainttex 15y ago
They've caused me a fair amount of downtime on several sites too. The third time they made my sites unavailable for hours I cancelled the paid plan and switched off them.
kevingadd 15y ago
Their service is so flaky that at present I would never consider upgrading from the free tier to the paid tier. Theoretically it's a great idea and something I'd pay for, but not when it's so busted.
xpose2000 15y ago
Agreed. It also adds time connecting to your site, sometimes up to 100ms. Google crawlbot stats confirm it every time I switch on or off using Cloudflare. Not sure its worth the bandwidth/http request savings on a small site. If you run a big site, you'd be willing to pay for a top notch CDN. Cloudflare sits in a weird middle ground.
girlvinyl 15y ago
I've experienced terrible service as a customer as well. I think that place is a mess.
adriand 15y ago
Some big swings in the opinions on CloudFlare in this thread so far. I've used CloudFlare on a site with low traffic and I liked the results and so I just recommended that a publisher client who gets around 20,000 daily uniques should use it too. On reading some of the criticisms here, I'm concerned I made the wrong recommendation - but at the same time, I'm also seeing comments like "CloudFlare is fantastic". Can anyone weigh in with what I really need to know about CloudFlare in order to ascertain if it's a good choice for my client or not?
- luigi 15y ago
  I used it for my low traffic personal site and thought it was great. But then one my posts got on the front page of HN and the traffic triggered CAPTCHAs for everyone. I dialed down the security settings and the CAPTCHAs went away, but still, that was annoying. And tech support wouldn't own up to their software thinking an HN spike was an attack. Then I used it for my startup, which was using an SSL cert, and it had major problems on launch day because of that (ugh). It continued to have SSL compatibility issues for a week, so I've only been using it as a DNS since. As a test, I enabled it on staging and have left it off on production. To their credit, it seems like the SSL downtime issues have gone away. It's been fine as a DNS, but I don't really have any desire to enable the CloudFlare features again. I love the idea of it keeping me safe from spambots and DDOS. At the same time, it really is a single point of failure, and it's failed more than any other technology in my stack. And the caching layer is way too brittle. I've set up rules to turn it off in staging.
  - dragonmantank 15y ago
    I hate their stance toward SSL. When one of the sites on Cloudflare needed SSL the only thing you could do was turn off caching for HTTPS. Since then they've added an SSL service where you can get an SSL cert from them. It only SSL's the traffic from the client to Cloudflare, not from Cloudflare back to the server so you've still got part of your transport not secured. I wonder how many people bought into that service without realizing that. (You can have Cloudflare connect HTTPS back to your server, but they still offer that partially covered option for some reason).
  - adriand 15y ago
    Thanks, I really appreciate the personal insight. I may take a wait-and-see approach with this one now.
larrys 15y ago
If you take a look at the number of domains transferred out from cloudflare servers daily (just change the date in the URL below) while they have a net gain generally every day it's interesting (and confirms what you are saying) about the service. Why so many people leaving so consistently? http://www.dailychanges.com/cloudflare.com/2012-04-14/ http://www.dailychanges.com/cloudflare.com/2012-04-14/
dragonmantank 15y ago
Same here. One of my clients uses it for all of his sites, and we have all sorts of problems with it. For a while it was flagging my Linux and Mac PCs as sending viruses/spamming cloudflare sites. They couldn't provide me any logs though. Honestly, I hate them.
- GVRV 15y ago
  Same here, it always thinks me or someone on my network has a virus and asks me to enter a re-captcha before "granting access" to the site. I have no clue why it thinks that!
  - dragonmantank 15y ago
    I wonder if it's related to odd traffic spikes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3856364 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3856364 I usually get flagged when following popular links from Twitter. I just find it highly annoying their support doesn't care. When this happens, I just get told to wait 72 hours or whatever and go back to the site. I wonder how many users sites lose because of that.

sainttex 15y ago

They've caused me a fair amount of downtime on several sites too. The third time they made my sites unavailable for hours I cancelled the paid plan and switched off them.

kevingadd 15y ago

Their service is so flaky that at present I would never consider upgrading from the free tier to the paid tier. Theoretically it's a great idea and something I'd pay for, but not when it's so busted.

xpose2000 15y ago

Agreed. It also adds time connecting to your site, sometimes up to 100ms. Google crawlbot stats confirm it every time I switch on or off using Cloudflare. Not sure its worth the bandwidth/http request savings on a small site. If you run a big site, you'd be willing to pay for a top notch CDN. Cloudflare sits in a weird middle ground.

girlvinyl 15y ago

I've experienced terrible service as a customer as well. I think that place is a mess.

adriand 15y ago

Some big swings in the opinions on CloudFlare in this thread so far. I've used CloudFlare on a site with low traffic and I liked the results and so I just recommended that a publisher client who gets around 20,000 daily uniques should use it too. On reading some of the criticisms here, I'm concerned I made the wrong recommendation - but at the same time, I'm also seeing comments like "CloudFlare is fantastic". Can anyone weigh in with what I really need to know about CloudFlare in order to ascertain if it's a good choice for my client or not?

luigi 15y ago
I used it for my low traffic personal site and thought it was great. But then one my posts got on the front page of HN and the traffic triggered CAPTCHAs for everyone. I dialed down the security settings and the CAPTCHAs went away, but still, that was annoying. And tech support wouldn't own up to their software thinking an HN spike was an attack. Then I used it for my startup, which was using an SSL cert, and it had major problems on launch day because of that (ugh). It continued to have SSL compatibility issues for a week, so I've only been using it as a DNS since. As a test, I enabled it on staging and have left it off on production. To their credit, it seems like the SSL downtime issues have gone away. It's been fine as a DNS, but I don't really have any desire to enable the CloudFlare features again. I love the idea of it keeping me safe from spambots and DDOS. At the same time, it really is a single point of failure, and it's failed more than any other technology in my stack. And the caching layer is way too brittle. I've set up rules to turn it off in staging.
- dragonmantank 15y ago
  I hate their stance toward SSL. When one of the sites on Cloudflare needed SSL the only thing you could do was turn off caching for HTTPS. Since then they've added an SSL service where you can get an SSL cert from them. It only SSL's the traffic from the client to Cloudflare, not from Cloudflare back to the server so you've still got part of your transport not secured. I wonder how many people bought into that service without realizing that. (You can have Cloudflare connect HTTPS back to your server, but they still offer that partially covered option for some reason).
- adriand 15y ago
  Thanks, I really appreciate the personal insight. I may take a wait-and-see approach with this one now.

larrys 15y ago

If you take a look at the number of domains transferred out from cloudflare servers daily (just change the date in the URL below) while they have a net gain generally every day it's interesting (and confirms what you are saying) about the service. Why so many people leaving so consistently? http://www.dailychanges.com/cloudflare.com/2012-04-14/ http://www.dailychanges.com/cloudflare.com/2012-04-14/

dragonmantank 15y ago

Same here. One of my clients uses it for all of his sites, and we have all sorts of problems with it. For a while it was flagging my Linux and Mac PCs as sending viruses/spamming cloudflare sites. They couldn't provide me any logs though. Honestly, I hate them.

GVRV 15y ago
Same here, it always thinks me or someone on my network has a virus and asks me to enter a re-captcha before "granting access" to the site. I have no clue why it thinks that!
- dragonmantank 15y ago
  I wonder if it's related to odd traffic spikes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3856364 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3856364 I usually get flagged when following popular links from Twitter. I just find it highly annoying their support doesn't care. When this happens, I just get told to wait 72 hours or whatever and go back to the site. I wonder how many users sites lose because of that.