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Cloudflare

Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep
edited May 2012 in General

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.

image

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?

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Comments

  • SpencerSpencer Member

    Cloudflare stats are really wrong btw. They are VERY skewed in my experience.

    Thanked by 2Infinity NanoG6
  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    @PytoHost How so?

  • RophRoph Member

    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.

    Thanked by 1NanoG6
  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider

    @Roph said: 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.

    And the reasoning behind their motivation for doing this is what exactly?

  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    @Roph So far I haven't had this problem of any of cloudflare saying any of my sites are down

  • RophRoph Member

    Implying I know? Or care? Or that it's deliberate?

    Regardless, it's incorrect.

  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider
    edited May 2012

    @Roph said: 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?

    Thanked by 1flam316
  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    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.

  • JTRJTR Member

    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).

    Thanked by 1NanoG6
  • I saw the same error all the time while working at HostGator. And no, HostGator's server was not down, blocking CF, etc.

    Thanked by 1NanoG6
  • AldryicAldryic Member

    @joepie91 said: And the reasoning behind their motivation for doing this is what exactly?

    Self-advertisement. Might be worth fine-combing through their TOS to see if its something mentioned.

    Thanked by 1Infinity
  • sonicsonic Veteran

    You're right!!!

    @Roph said: 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.

  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    @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

  • beardbeard Member

    CF is crap, skiddies think they can hide their warez sites behind it

  • @sonic said: 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.

    I see it happen all the time if a requested page takes longer than $x (30 seconds?) to load.

  • vmhostsvmhosts Member

    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

  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    Seems to me, Cloudflare is hit and miss depending on different people's situations

  • flam316flam316 Member

    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.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    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 :)

    Thanked by 1nabo
  • AldryicAldryic Member

    @flam316 said: I have gotten only 2 spam comments in the year + that I've been using them.

    ...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?

  • nabonabo Member

    @Aldryic said: what would CloudFlare possibly have to do with spam comments?

    Maybe instead of his site the Cloudflare site has been shown. So nobody was able to make comments at all ;->

    Thanked by 2Aldryic NanoG6
  • @Aldryic said: ...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?

    They have some JS "are you a real browser" complete-bullshit-crap-horrible-omg-please-don't apparently.

  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    @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.

  • flam316flam316 Member

    @jarland said: 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 :)

    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.

    @Aldryic said: ...what would CloudFlare possibly have to do with spam comments?

    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.

    Did you by chance enable Askimet at the same time, and not notice which one did the work?

    I have Askimet enabled also, but it hasn't been doing much work because almost no (2) spam comments ever get to it.

    @DimeCadmium said: They have some JS "are you a real browser" complete-bullshit-crap-horrible-omg-please-don't apparently.

    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.

  • DimeCadmiumDimeCadmium Member
    edited May 2012

    @flam316 said: 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)

  • lbftlbft Member

    @Aldryic said: ...what would CloudFlare possibly have to do with spam comments?

    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.

    @DimeCadmium said: 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. ;)

    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).

  • @lbft said: 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.

    ...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.)

    Thanked by 1jar
  • flam316flam316 Member

    @DimeCadmium said: 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)

    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.

    @lbft said: It got compromised in the first place through CloudFlare though, so it's far from perfect.

    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.

  • DimeCadmiumDimeCadmium Member
    edited May 2012

    @flam316 said: 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 wasn't a captcha, is was some JS redirect or something along those lines. Fully automated, no intervention on my part.

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