Cloudflare Stats

**damoncloudflare** · 8 February, 2012, 13:37 PM

"The paid version is only to prevent SSL from breaking as far as I know. The free version of CloudFlare breaks SSL. "
Actually, Pro provides the following benefits:
SSL support is included for free
Faster Stats (update every 15 mins)
Website Preloader (better caching)
Web Application Firewall

Free accounts can still use CloudFlare, but SSL would need to be on a subdomain we don't touch if you don't want to upgrade.

---------- Post added at 14:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 14:29 PM ----------

"
Some extremely annoying problems we had were excessive gateway timeouts, which were blamed on us, except the timeouts came from cloudflare service. And their no cached version available message all the time. Maybe it's different for people who are connecting from overseas, who knows. But I'm sure there's an excuse ready for everything.

Gateway timeouts actually indicate a potential datacenter issue or other, so should be reported to us immediately.
No cached version: Only occurs when the server is down, or something is blocking requests from CloudFlare IPs.

At one point they had a problem with a javascript file being loaded that wasn't supposed to be loaded at all if you didn't have some other feature enabled.. took them like 2 weeks to fix it. I wonder how many other people ditched their service after that.
https://support.cloudflare.com/discu...l-apps-are-off
(I believe this was an issue with apps that was resolved as quickly as humanly possible).

The site load time also blew up to like 60 seconds, from about 15 seconds before the service was running.
What are you basing this off?

Cloudflare didn't block nearly as much bad stuff as they claimed it would. We still had lots of attacks and bots coming through being picked by our php firewall. One claim that it did the same kind of header checks as bad behavior was not true either, since bad behavior still picked up a lot of things."
We don't claim to stop everything. We also only proxy traffic coming over certain ports. What we challenge is based on our data sources, so we won't (again) catch or challenge everything.

"Surely that's one huge conflict of interest right there. "
We can't monitor every site on the service, nor is our role as a censorship agent. We do comply with all valid requests from law enforcement and DMCA requests, and we do work with online security services to take actions against accounts engaging in bad activity. It would be like saying the hosting provider is responsible for the action of either the site owner or the site's members & our role is not to be the internet censor.

**javanx3d** · 8 February, 2012, 21:26 PM

Thanks Damon. If you have time to post more here, do you have any data you can share on the IPv6 "bridging" function Cloud Flare provides when you get a chance? (wrong term I'm sure...)
Thanks much!
James

**OurInternet** · 21 February, 2012, 14:10 PM

Well, I'd check it out, thanks for suggestion

**damoncloudflare** · 22 February, 2012, 18:52 PM

"
Cloudflare didn't block nearly as much bad stuff as they claimed it would. We still had lots of attacks and bots coming through being picked by our php firewall. One claim that it did the same kind of header checks as bad behavior was not true either, since bad behavior still picked up a lot of things."
We don't claim to block everything. The challenge behavior is triggered when our Data Sources reports the behavior.

"At one point they had a problem with a javascript file being loaded that wasn't supposed to be loaded at all if you didn't have some other feature enabled.. took them like 2 weeks to fix it. I wonder how many other people ditched their service after that.
https://support.cloudflare.com/discu...l-apps-are-off"
Yes, that bug took more time to fix than we would have liked & I do apologize. We did, however, build in safeguards so that this shouldn't happen again.

"Some people also find it a bit hypocritical for the guys at cloudflare to have no problems at all with providing protection for websites run by criminals, spammers, hackers etc, since cloudflare claims to be in the business of protecting people against those kinds of sites. Surely that's one huge conflict of interest right there. "
We can't monitor all of the activity on the sites on our network. We do respond to abuse complaints, work with law enforcement, etc.

"ome extremely annoying problems we had were excessive gateway timeouts, which were blamed on us, except the timeouts came from cloudflare service. And their no cached version available message all the time. Maybe it's different for people who are connecting from overseas, who knows. But I'm sure there's an excuse ready for everything."
The gateway errors are actually probably our fault. These tend to appear (infrequently) when a datacenter is having an issue, and we tend to fix these issues rapidly.

"And their no cached version available message all the time"
This only happens when (a) the webserver is actually down, or (b) something is blocking requests from CloudFlare's IPs. Our IPs should be whitelisted on your server & with your host.

"The site load time also blew up to like 60 seconds, from about 15 seconds before the service was running."
This is honestly very strange. Are you basing this off of time to first byte?