New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Is it safe to use cloudflare for critical applications
Hi,
We have situation where website is using cloudflare hence domain DNS is controlled by CF. Now my question is can we trust Cloudflare if we host critical application through this domain because ultimately CF have full control over your traffic (in and out) even if you choose to bypass their system for certain urls .. technically they can mangle stuff without your knowledge.
Please share your views.
Comments
Use cloudflare for DNS only (click the cloud to make sure it's grey). That way, cloudflare only provides DNS functionality, not a reverse proxy.
That doesn't remove the need for trust. Now they just have to change the DNS entries first if they want to mess with your traffic.
Realistically, you're just going to have to trust Cloudflare if you want to use them.
No.
The more you own, the more you run the more the project is yours
Thats what I am thinking, and above all , they actually have technology already in place to analyze and mangle your traffic as well as page.. but interestingly, somewhere I was reading that around 18% traffic of web now passes through CF !!!
Thats what I think...
It's not a question of "can", it's a question of "if".
I mean, plenty of critical applications are hosted on CloudFlare, so some people clearly do trust them to "host critical application".
If you're paying CloudFlare enough they'll allow you to roll with your own DNS. We're talking 4-figures though, enterprise plan territory.
Well, I know that NameCheap is using CloudFlare's acceleration service + DNS.
They just set a custom SSL on their Enterprise plan.
In Business plan, they allow you to use your own DNS and point Cname to use their system for URLs you wish to use with CF.
They'll allow you to use custom name servers with the business plan. I'm taking rolling your own DNS, off the CloudFlare network.
I think cloudflare hosting partners use their own DNS servers, used to be the case anyway.
@dragon2611 that's correct, yes. Customers of optimised partners get to use Railgun if deployed by the provider.
Cloudflare is a big company now, if they would fiddle with your DNS records they would lose all their credibility...
I would still prefer to have admin access to the entire infrastructure processing my data. :-).
Reddit (arguably one of the biggest websites on the internet) uses Cloudflare and there's a lot of other large websites that do too. I think if you're going to trust Cloudflare for anything, you shouldn't use the free plan. If you're paying them, they'd have less interest in messing anything up for you.
I've used their free plan and have noticed slow loading times on occasion (according to Pingdom monitoring). I've now switched off their protection and just use them for DNS.
Be aware here that biggest ones are using at least 200$ plan.
Not really. How will he prove?
That's rather chicky assumption. You will be surprized that if you pay someone, there are no guarantees he won't cheat you. Let me give you modern example. USA goverment receive a lot of money from taxes, but still spy a lot for their citizens (amongst other countries).
That's the question of "what more important". Do you think that money is the most important? You mistaken. The most important is power, authority, rule, dominion.
I think the answer is no. I wanted to create new topic, but i feel uncomfortable to do topic for such a little event, so i will just post it here as reply to your post.
'CloudFlare decrease speed for free users.
From their website:
https://www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn
It means that, if any Pro (or Business, or Enterprise) user will have traffic burst, ddos or just CloudFlare resources will be near end, free users will face slow websites.
Huge note to their free users. Slow website is now an official feature of CloudFlare free plan.'
Our Customers using free Cloudflare as part of their hosting packages (We are optimised Hosted Partners) were reporting issues that their traffic is routed through USA and so websites are working slower than without Cloudflare. This was as a result of not enough capacity, so yes, I agree with @Profforg.
I had tried using Cloudflare Free on my websites but too often I was getting long load times at random periods, however their free dns is awesome.
Well, based on feedback here and our personal inclination, we are not going to host those critical stuff even through CF DNS, have .net domain for same website unused, will use that for it.
CloudFlare is more for filtering traffic, and not so much handling it. So if you have a website that is constantly a target for DDoS attacks, its great. But if your website gets loads of legitimate traffic, its just going to keep your server bogged down. For example, NameCheap tried using CloudFlare for its Black Friday deals and it ended up back firing because CloudFlare thought they were under a DDoS attack, tried to filter the traffic but the traffic was all legitimate so the traffic was paaed to NameCheap's servers which in turn caused them to be overloaded. I believe they ended up switching to Amazon AWS and now their back with CloudFlare. I use KeyCDN as its very affordable, increases load times and you can use your own SSL certificate as well.
If We Cannot Trust Cloudflare , then we might have lost hope
Bandhu Nishanth,
Well, still We have it :-P
We use for our main website cloudflare and enabled. For the last year the uptime was 100% so.. I think you have to choose. I suggest