Is Cloudflare worth it? I’ve no intention of paying the monthly fee for it, so is the free service worth bothering with?
I’ve heard it can mess with FTP access among other things. Anyone have any experience?
I would say… Know what it is and what it does. I believe many people get it for the wrong reasons. Search this forum and web in general for “Cloudflare issue” and “Cloudflare problems” etc. Disclaimer: I’ve never used the service but I’ve seen enough issues that I’d consider it’s use very carefully.
I’m sure others who actually use the service will reply with hands on knowledge.
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I’m a bit wary of CloudFlare. They had a massive data leak earlier in the year. Also, it was impossible on my hosting company to make the changes to the settings which would allow it to work properly.
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Don’t leave home without it. I have used it quite a few sites, speed improvements are considerable, especially if you are on a shared hosting plan.
I use Cloudflare on most of the websites I build.
The “free” plan gives you:
- SSL (including “Automatic HTTPS Rewrites”)
- caching of HTML. CSS and JavaScript
- Rocketloader (which Foundation supports)
- and extra site security
Why wouldn’t you use it? All this for free?
The only thing you have to remember, is to put it into “Development Mode” when making changes to your website.
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I think the “Development Mode” is what’s been causing me problems.
So you just sign up for the full version (‘cname only’ only seems to be available as part of a paid plan), repoint the DNS and set to development mode any time you want to use FTP or make changes to the website in RW?
Anything else I should be aware of?
I love Cloudflare and suggest that everyone use them…
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That seems to be the problem most people have is remembering they have CloudFlair turned on.
Development mode will go directly to your server for 3 hours or until you turn it back off. Under the “cache” tab you an also purge your cache to apply updates. The free account only allows you to purge all, not individual files.
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Regarding this point - I did have an issue with this on one site, but it was simply a matter of changing the server address to have ‘ftp’ in front (so if it was simply example.com, with cloudflare, it needed to be ftp.example.com). I don’t remember the exact scenario but it was a realtively simple fix
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Many thanks for the replies guys. Much appreciated. I think I’ll take another look.
I did everything like the video said. It is pretty simple. Pasted the DNS names as custom to my Godaddy host. But then my website wouldn’t load. Double and triple checked.
Anyone have any suggestions?
What is it doing when you try to load? DNS changes can take a bit of time to roll out.
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It is a blank page.
I understand the changes may take a bit. How long is reasonable? I made the change in the evening and it was still this way in the morning. One of the tutorials said you could go to Whois which I did and it did not have the CloudFlare DNS names.