Cloudflare Reviews

- 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.