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Cloudflare
Awmusic12635
Member, Host Rep
Been using cloudflare for a little bit now and I must say, I like it. Making my sites run faster, security (stopped liked 20,000 threats, mostly spammers). The Stats are pretty nice was well.
I run a reverse proxy of nginx in front of apache, does anyone know the name of the correct nginx module to display the correct IP?
Comments
http://bit.ly/LKbctx
Cloudflare stats are really wrong btw. They are VERY skewed in my experience.
@PytoHost How so?
For the time that I used cloudflare I had the same experience. Their stats were so wrong. Much, much lower than what google analytics counted. Google analytics appears with almost identical results to my own Piwik stats tracking, so I'm happy with Google.
Cloudflare also has a tendency to lie about your site / server being down when they demonstrably aren't. This means your visitors see a cloudflare page instead of your site, incorrectly stating that it's unavailable. At least once a week they would do this, hence I ditched them.
It's happened before, you may see a cloudflare fanboy / apologist coming here and saying it's my problem, but I doubt ServInt has connectivity issues. They're not some tiny host leasing a single unstable uplink from Cogent or something.
Cloudflare is nice in theory, but I don't trust them.
And the reasoning behind their motivation for doing this is what exactly?
@Roph So far I haven't had this problem of any of cloudflare saying any of my sites are down
Implying I know? Or care? Or that it's deliberate?
Regardless, it's incorrect.
I have had the issue once myself, and it was because DoS Deflate tripped out over the Cloudflare IPs.
So far, any issues with Cloudflare seem to be on the side of the server, not that of CF, at least as far as I've seen. "Cloudflare has a tendency to lie about [...]" implies that you expect them to do it deliberately; after all, how can you know they are actually lieing and not just having an issue of sorts? Hell, you don't even know whether you may have the issue.
EDIT: Last time I asked someone 'have you contacted support', there seemed to be no response. So again, have you contacted support about it?
I dislike cloudflare overall. For one thing, I don't like the idea that a visitor could hit my page and not be loading it from a datacenter which I am able to contact in the event of an issue. Another, I have only experienced increased load times for websites that I have tested. Granted, not significant increases, but increases nonetheless. Obviously this could vary based on location, but that brings me back to the loss of control over the user experience.
Cloudflare is a nice idea, but in practice, I've seen nothing in return but increased load times and more downtime (those damn error pages are everywhere).
I saw the same error all the time while working at HostGator. And no, HostGator's server was not down, blocking CF, etc.
Self-advertisement. Might be worth fine-combing through their TOS to see if its something mentioned.
You're right!!!
Cloudflare also has a tendency to lie about your site / server being down when they demonstrably aren't. This means your visitors see a cloudflare page instead of your site, incorrectly stating that it's unavailable. At least once a week they would do this, hence I ditched them.
It's happened before, you may see a cloudflare fanboy / apologist coming here and saying it's my problem, but I doubt ServInt has connectivity issues. They're not some tiny host leasing a single unstable uplink from Cogent or something.
Cloudflare is nice in theory, but I don't trust them.
@Aldyric I just took a look though it and couldn't find anything too bad, though I guess I could have missed something. Section 7 might be the most controversial but it seems to just cover what their service does. https://www.cloudflare.com/terms
CF is crap, skiddies think they can hide their warez sites behind it
I see it happen all the time if a requested page takes longer than $x (30 seconds?) to load.
We use them and haven’t had any issues so far (that I am aware of) We have a few larger images on our home page and was keen to try and give the best possible performance. Also our website and customer portals are hosted with a different provider (for connectivity purposes in the event of any outages) so we have less visibility over the available bandwidth.
Page load speeds seem to be much faster and if it stops a few fraudulent orders each month it’s worth the money
Seems to me, Cloudflare is hit and miss depending on different people's situations
CloudFlare has halved my load time on all of my sites. I have gotten only 2 spam comments in the year + that I've been using them. Most (almost all) CloudFlare users have had the around the same positive experience that I've had. As you know, most people who write reviews will write bad reviews, and for a service that controls almost 500,000 sites, it shows. Pretty good for a free service, if you ask me.
Makes me wonder what you could do to your load times by choosing a better location and/or using a better server. Not to tear down your experience, just makes me wonder
...what would CloudFlare possibly have to do with spam comments? Did you by chance enable Askimet at the same time, and not notice which one did the work?
Maybe instead of his site the Cloudflare site has been shown. So nobody was able to make comments at all ;->
They have some JS "are you a real browser" complete-bullshit-crap-horrible-omg-please-don't apparently.
@Aldryic I forget exactly what spam database they use but they they IP addresses from spammers a such. As well as their Wordpress plugin which reports spam comments back to them and their form and Ip's. At least, that's what I read.
No matter where I place my website, without a CDN it is still only being loaded from one location. There will still be people loading my site from the other end of the world, and latency will be a problem. Obviously, putting a CDN in front of with a crap origin server with a crap connection won't do much good because dynamic content/html is usually loaded from origin.
In other words, the servers I host on are fast hardware and network wise, but nothing can compare to a CDN like CloudFlare or MaxCDN or EdgeCast for sites with any sort of international presence.
CloudFlare blocks users/bots based on IP history. If the IP has a history of spam or attacks originating from it, than it will be blocked by CloudFlare. CloudFlare blocks mostly all spam comments and threats, which is what the service is intended to do.
I have Askimet enabled also, but it hasn't been doing much work because almost no (2) spam comments ever get to it.
They block based on IPs, but they also offer a browser detection feature. It does have a warning that it is not accurate 100% of the time and to turn it off if you are worried about visitors getting blocked.
I wasn't sure if they did IP blocks, I just knew about the detection having seen it in action on a certain site recently.
I really dislike it... took a good 5 or 10 seconds to get past it, by which time most visitors would be gone. (This is on a fairly high-end gaming laptop, mind you, and a 20/2Mbps pipe)
CloudFlare blocks/challeneges IPs that have spam reports. They gather it from both Project Honeypot and reports from their customers (they even make a plugin for Wordpress that sends spam reports to them). Their original pitch was for security - the CDN/speedup stuff was them trying to counteract the slowdown of proxying every request.
A low-traffic site of mine got compromised (most likely through the ancient custom theme on the blog) and I reinstalled Wordpress from scratch. I forgot to set up the anti-spam stuff for a couple of weeks and I didn't notice because I was only getting a couple of spam comments a week - CloudFlare was stopping the rest.
It got compromised in the first place through CloudFlare though, so it's far from perfect.
To be fair, that site was dodgy enough that it probably triggered every automated system they have :P They also explicitly say that it's a bad idea to route domains that mainly serve files through CF, so maybe they throw up additional roadblocks to discourage it.
The normal challenge is a page with a reCaptcha (which really sucks, but it's better than outright blocking).
...this is true. :P
IMO, it still would've been nice if I could've grabbed it from a server... instead of having to download however much data on my home connection... (and no, no nefarious purposes here, I just wanted to see what of me was in it.)
Why does the speed of your connection and your laptop matter in this situation? Captchas don't care what kind of hardware you have or what network you have.
It's not a full solution, but your site could have been hacked sooner if it weren't for CloudFlare. CloudFlare isn't a solution for insecure code.
It wasn't a captcha, is was some JS redirect or something along those lines. Fully automated, no intervention on my part.