I've been following the hackings of sony, pbs, etc by LulzSec and I saw that LulzSec is using CloudFlare to help its websites hold out against DDoS attacks. From what I can tell, it's like a P2P CDN with some extra security layers built on top of it. I haven't had a lot of time to dig into it yet, but thought you guys might be interested.
I been testing CloudFlare on one of my high bandwidth usage sites and it is standing up extremely well (seeing as it is free) I am not sure at what point they will start asking me for money.
While the following aren't problems and I realised what was happening it could be a bit daunting to less experienced people. I think their help file needs a bit updating.
Its a cpanel/whm server and cloudflare moved the usual folders /cpanel /webmail /whm etc to subdomains but it all still works the same.
The stats on the free account are 1 day late but it seems to still allow my normal stats to work which are running live time.
The site gets a lot of traffic from china/russia/usa the drain the site was having on the server nearly made the server unusable but now I can host other sites on it again.
Would I run all my sites on it probably not as I do tend to like to keep stuff close to my chest and having other companies have access to my statistics is a bit of an annoyance to me. But then it saved me from splitting the site onto 2 different servers which would have cost me a lot more than free. I have another high traffic site that I think I will move on it and pay the $25 for both sites it seems a small price to pay to get use of my servers back.
Just another short update, if you are planning on selling your site you may not want to use Cloudflare as because it's basically a proxy server all your incoming uniques are based on cloudflares ip range, so while your overall visitors should still show up semi accurately your uniques will be decreased dramatically.
Here's another idea
Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.
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Being the paranoid type I tend to steer clear of google products mainly because I don't really want them to know what I am doing lol.
I am not saying this is true but can you see where all this google stuff is going. I reckon as soon as they can get .goo or .google tld they can then force all webmasters onto it charging whatever they like and then hosting as well hahahah oh my paranoid brain is working overtime at the moment.
I think they are only in trial mode at the moment but I might apply for an account just to see.
At this time, Page Speed Service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later. You can request access to the service by filling out this web form.
1 thing (for the free account at least) they only use the USA/HongKong cdn part of the network. I couldn't find this mentioned in any of their help files. It's not a problem but they seem to quote
My statistics only show USA/HK again it's not a problem but if you traffic is say mainly from UK then having the cdn work from only USA/HK could slow your site down a bit.CloudFlare makes your site faster
CloudFlare’s global CDN has 12 edge nodes around the world. Our CDN automatically caches your static files at our edge nodes so these files are stored closer to your visitors while delivering your dynamic content directly from your web server.
On the security front it has blocked at least 3 legitimate people (even though their ip's were listed as bots) 3 in the few months I have been running it seems ok. 3 in 60,000 is probably an acceptable level. It has definitely stopped the majority of attempts at xss and admin hacking. Which I found quite interesting so now I am planning to place a bugged script on a domain and place that under the cloudflare cdn and see how long it takes before the site gets hacked.
I got out of bed today staring at a ghost. Who forgot to float away, didnt have all that much to say. Wouldn't even tell me his own name.
Non ducor, duco
Clinton (October 14th, 2011)
I've come across more than one case of very experienced webmasters having major trouble with their vB forums till they got out of cloudflare. They tried everything including doing a fresh reinstall of vB 4.x with default settings and still had issues with the likes of WYSIWYG editing in forum posts. Beware also if you have a lot of custom modifications to your vB site ... or plugins.
OTOH, there are some vbulletin forums running perfectly well with hosting companies using cloudflare.
(For those who don't know, if you have cPanel you'll have an icon there to enable/disable CloudFlare if your hosting company offers it)
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I ran it on a flash games site for quite a few months and while it seemed to save bandwidth the actual load times of the pages and site (according to WebmasterTools) and my own browser tests actually appeared to get worse and certainly no better.
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