Help required regarding pros & cons of Cloudflare

  • Resolved SB

    (@indradhonu)


    11 years, 2 months ago

    My hosting provider is suggesting me activate the Cloudflare.
    My query is that whether it really necessary for quicker page upload and utilising lesser server resources like bandwidth?

    I have gone through the cloudflare site. I also have some doubts on the cloudflare service.
    In its Terms, it is specified that in free account(I’m not going to use paid account either) the crawling will be once in a week. They’re also mentioning that they support dynamic websites.
    How this two things possible simultaneously(for free accounts)? If it crawls weekly(unlike paid plans where regular crawling is there), then how it could reflect the edited comments/posts? Will the site users have to wait for a week to get the edited comments and posts, if any? If so, then what is the term ‘dynamic’ stands for?

    Can anyone through light on these matters/issues so that it will help me for better understanding of pros & cons of Cloudflare?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • @andrew — I went ahead and reopened this to provide a bit of info, and also since Cloudflare is not at all a hosting provider — if anyone disagrees feel free to reclose (that’s probably not a word!)

    @indradhonu — I won’t bother you with the cloudflare nitty gritty, it sounds like you’ve done your research already

    I can assure you that when you route dynamic sites through cloudflare, they work just fine. Take my WordPress support site for instance, voodoopress.com — you can see it there, it has a fresh new post, and all my comments display immediately.

    I would assume that cloudflare crawls weekly so that, for static sites or static components (css), everything gets up to date

    For dynamic sites, updates ping cloudflare so that content is immediately available.

    I’ve run it on a couple sites, and according to cloudflares own stats, it seems to save me a good deal of resources. I do have other sites not run through cloudflare and I can’t say I see any huge difference in terms of performance. So, as they say YMMV – it probably doesn;t hurt to experiment.

    As I mentioned earlier, static content doesn;t get updated often, remember this if you are working on themes or editing css live on your site. You need to turn on development mode in cloudflare, or you won’t see the changes on your site at all until the next crawl.

    — as a note, I set up cloudflare manually, not through any host. And I have only used the free version which seems to work perfectly fine.

    Thread Starter SB

    (@indradhonu)

    Gr8 clarification,..Rev. Voodoo.
    I will surely give it a try andwill update my feedback.
    Thanx a lot for your kind help.

    “In its Terms, it is specified that in free account(I’m not going to use paid account either) the crawling will be once in a week. They’re also mentioning that they support dynamic websites.”

    This is relative to the Always Online feature that does require a crawl. It does not apply to normal CloudFlare caching, which works by file extension.

    ” Will the site users have to wait for a week to get the edited comments and posts, if any? If so, then what is the term ‘dynamic’ stands for?”

    We won’t impact dynamic updates. The only concern is when you make changes to the static content that we would cache, so you would need to go to Development Mode or purge your cache (like changes to CSS, JavaScript, Images, etc.).

    Thread Starter SB

    (@indradhonu)

    Thanks for all the replies. My confusions regarding the cloudflare is somewhat clear right now.
    So, the purpose of the topic is fulfilled. It may be considered as resolved.

    @rev. Voodoo:- My feedback:-I had installed cloudflare for my WP site. But, not found so much improvement in page loading speed, rather it seems somewhat decrease in speed, hence decided to deactivate the same.(I had activated cloudflare through my hosting provider). This may be the case specifically for my location India as cloudflare has no datacenter here. This my personal opinion.

    We currently don’t have a data center in India (working on/being looked at). Visitors in India would currently hit Singapore in most cases….

    How are you testing? You definitely don’t want to use ping.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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