Do you use Cloudflare for your websites? Let me know the pro and cons!

Forums › IT Pro and developers › Do you use Cloudflare for your websites? Let me know the pro and cons!

turtleattacks

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#315811 18-Aug-2024 11:18

I use Cloudflare in all of my websites, some of them get a decent amount of traffic.

As my hosting is still based out in the UK, it helps when my users are mostly in AU/NZ.

However, this morning and I fat fingered, deleting our Cloudflare link/account making about an outage for an hour.

So I suppose I would love to ask the tech experts here if you guys also use Cloudflare in your websites.

----

Creator of whatsthesalary.com and whatstheincometax.com

hamish225

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#3273209 18-Aug-2024 12:23

cloudflare is pretty useful, lots of cool features like letting you add a CNAME to the root domain, instead of the A record that is normally required, API changes to DNS records. I don't use the proxy feature. Apart from the other week where it looked like cloudflare dropped off the internet and i had a moment of panic since my emails would be down if their DNS stopped working.... it's been fine!

The other option for me would be to use 1st Domains DNS, which also goes through cloudflare but gives only the basic options to the user, no proxy, no CNAME records in the root of the domain.

I probably don't NEED cloudflare specifically, I just use it now because it was free and something to try out one day and now all my domains are there. I did make use of the API at some point for requesting SSL certificates though, that was pretty cool but the thing i was using that for has been broken for a while now and the software vendor has put out something better that does the same thing without all the custom faff.

*Insert big spe*dtest result here*

michaelmurfy

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#3273232 18-Aug-2024 14:08

Yep I use Cloudflare across everything.

A good one is https://promods.net - most is served from Cloudflare R2 and the rest is pretty-much cached:

We can do upwards of 120TB of traffic in a month for quite little in CDN costs (around $40US per month). The site itself is very quick here in New Zealand despite the servers being hosted in Germany and France.

Without Cloudflare, we would have to have way more server infrastructure than we currently have costing us way more in the process.

I also use Cloudflare Free across everything I personally host. Another is https://thecheese.co.nz where Cloudflare even is used for the radio stream, on the free plan also. Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnels are also great for protecting servers.

As you likely know, Geekzone also uses Cloudflare.

So, yes, I recommend it even for the free plan. It adds quite a bit of protection to your sites and a CDN also. With some tweaks to the caching rules you can have images etc fully cached by Cloudflare and have them hitting your server for just non static content. It's a great platform.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
Referral Links: Quic Broadband (use R122101E7CV7Q for free setup)

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