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Did Cloudflare hurt your website's performance?
Hi LET!
I've read reports of people having trouble with CF (slower loading for some parts of the world, worse ranking on Google, etc), but in my experience using CF didn't bring anything negative.
As there are LET users in all parts of the world, how does Cloudflare performs in your area? Did you encounter any problem when using Cloudflare that made you consider to stop using it?
I'd guess that it's pretty good for EU/North America and OK for south America, what about other locations? Any direct experiences?
Thanks!
Comments
If there were any impact in Google, it'd be because of slower load times. There's 7 million+ domains on CF, a decent portion of active domains.
Cloudflare murdered my kittens.
Well, a few times in a month, you notice, that all of my websites I access which are behind cloudflare, getting painfull slow.
Even Discord gets laggy and non responsive.
So yes, I would not enable CF CDN for that reason, also because of privacy and broken TLS.
For the first several years of their existence they rendered a large proportion of the web semi inaccessible to me (random connection drops during loading causing truncated/error pages, very slow loading, etc). This was on a major ISP and nothing changed on my end to fix it
I'll never forgive them for this, and never use them for fear of affecting even one of my users with this cancer
Anything that centralises the web is a hard pass in my book
Cloudflare?
It isn't my site, but sometimes it's slow in South Korea because most site routes to another countries.
I think they do quite a bit for the amount they don't charge. Even with the free package, your website would probably be slower more often by simply being hosted with your provider anyway. There might be issues, we've had scripts getting broken by their caching and tons of headaches, but consider how much they offer for free, I wouldn't say it's bad.
The amount of time you'd need to yell at your provider for slowness would be reduced, despite of Cloudflare's occasional issues.
If you can afford it, go for the enterprise packages. There's no way you can keep everyone happy for free, but you'd definitely be happier than being alone with your provider in the room.
Depends on how you set it up. By default they don't cache full pages and I think they cache assets based on your Expires headers or a very low default cache time, so the 'set it and forget it' approach may just end up adding an extra hop between a visitor and your site, minimal benefits.
If you want to get some insane performance out of their free plan, look into the 'cache everything' page rule which will keep a full copy of your pages on the edge.
If you have a constantly changing site then it'll create a bunch of problems without some serious work, but if your content doesn't change much then you can get insane load times.
I've got cache everything with long expires headers (2 weeks+) setup on one site that gets updated once a month and it's like <400ms loads in almost every location I've been able to test once the cache is primed.
In my case, Cloudflare's free plan appeared to make my sites slower from the locations where I tried accessing them. I decided that the latency added through the extra hop wasn't worth it, so I disabled Cloudflare.
I never played around with changing my site's headers to control caching, so I admit that it's possible I didn't put enough effort into it to enjoy the benefits.
I now use Cloudflare only for DNS, and in my experience they are fantastic for that.
It was only "marginally" faster when I first started using them
But over time I was no longer routed to the nearest (Hong Kong) PoP - asking me to upgrade to Enterprise plan
That makes my website really really slow
Cloudflare hurts the performance of a lot of sites.
In fact every site that uses it.
It keeps me from accessing a lot of sites in a timely manner, even this one.
"5" seconds to load a simple webpage.
Come on.
That only happen when the site got under attack mode on.
You can always setup a dns record like cdn.yourdomain.com and only turn on cloudflare for that cdn record and then use it just for your images, css, js, and stuff rather then turn it on for the whole website.
Another reason to do this is if your hosting is some shitty shared hosting that doesnt even have http2, the difference can be night and day when loading 20 CF cached images over http2 vs 20 images served over http/s.
With the correct settings, Cloudflare can speed your website up.
We use Cloudflare to cache the static pages of our website allowing us to save a lot on bandwidth and prevent DDoS attacks from taking our website offline.
Well, try to take down a website with static content only.
I want to see that.
Besides DOS.
Thanks guys.
I did some more testing, mostly from south america / oceania / asia and the result was that there is no clear winner.
With the setup I experimented with (pages hosted with @Clouvider - static assets either on the same machine, with CF or with @BunnySpeed's BunnyCDN) I came to the following conclusion:
BunnyCDN is often faster than CF Free (but it was using their premium network, which comes with more locations than CF) BUT adding an extra DNS resolution that is sometimes (Australia if memory serves me well) painfully slow, reducing the difference a lot, or ending up even slower for first page loading.
Page served with CF (with no edge caching) is almost always slower than directly from the VPS, but sometimes it's as fast or a bit faster (from far, far away, thanks to faster TLS negotiation mainly it seems).
If the page is too far, it takes a lot of time to grab this page, and if you have to do another DNS query (prefetch is nice but the page has to be loaded for that, anyway!) you waste some precious ms. The best solutions would probably be to serve static pages from CF edge servers (cheapest as it can be done with CF Free plan), or to use Route 53 DNS and redirect user to the closest LEB, having VPSes in EU/US and Asia and synchronizing cached pages on those. In both cases it would still be possible to receive WP comments using ajaxify comments or something like that.
As some people seem to have routing issues with CF, the 3 VPS + GeoDNS is probably the way to go. But it's more expensive than CF Free + page rules + sunny.
before cloudflare = good seo, better rankings
after seo = poor rankings slow page speed
cloudflare = shith
the best = dickhair
This is not acceptable and it's against CF terms:
"Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited."
https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/
uh, so its targed to push all data throught them on the free plans.
Oh boy, data sells.
^this. Well said, very well said.
I see potential in you.
i've always found it to slow down, instead of optimize and speed up. Used to be very useful before ddos protection became standard at most hosts.
Yes, several times.
Because of bad users who selling drugs, and other shit on their sites, or political sites from the same IP pool. Because of that, in Russia for example a lot of IP's just banned, and you can't access at all these IP's, and does not matter if behind this IP legal site or not, nobody care, I had some russian specific business in past, and that was a key factor why I moved away for this project from Cloudflare just to stupid hosting without any CDN.
Harm? No.
But I never saw the caching and speed improvements they claim to offer the static elements of a dynamic website.
Because of bad users who selling drugs, and other shit on their sites, or political sites from the same IP pool. Because of that, in Russia for example a lot of IP's just banned
Thanks. Bad users on the same IP should theoretically not harm positions in google (but could bring a closer analysis on your website content's quality or link, in the fight of the search giant against PBNs) but I didn't consider that it could imply an IP block for a whole country. That's interesting.
Did CF fix that issue after some time or is it still difficult to access some sites behind CF?
'Bad neighbourhoods' has been a factor with Google for many years, they'll try to avoid IP ranges that have low quality content. When you're crawling the web it becomes apparent how much guff is out there. I'm not talking PBNs, more mass generated crap that they wouldn't want to rank highly for user's queries or even waste time crawling.
Cloudflare is probably not relevant in that regard, they have their set IP ranges and all manner of sites come from it, good and bad. I read (after seeing this thread) that there's a potential for Google to rate limit crawling on your site due to it being on a CDN/subnet as many other domains, but that shouldn't affect ranking in any way, just the speed of new/updated content getting into their index.
Cloudflare (free) is a joke. People should stop advertising freemium service in LET (that can be very expensive if you own a lot of portfolios). If you are a proud paid user then my comment is obviously irrelevant. However, those on a free ride can find this CF is rather useless especially if you're already on Let's Encrypt wildcard, needs plenty of page rules for redirecting, etc. etc. For example, if I open a website and it starts to ask me to key in some time-wasting captcha pictures, I'll just close it and browse some porns.
In theory yes, in real life - no.
Cloudflare leak all sites what you have on the same Cloudflare account, it's super easy to do.
Cloudflare also because of their certificates can share a lot of more information about you.
Cloudflare also affects your ranking too because of your neighbors.
Cloudflare also in personally mine experience break several times javascript on old XHTML sites which working without ANY warning at all without Cloudflare by replacing it with their own JS code which incompatible.
Also, Cloudflare have awful cache policy, and I really don't understand how it's supposed to work, I have some experience with other CDN's (all paid plans) mentioned here on lET (except bunnycdn) and they all cope with the tasks assigned to them without any problems at all.
Is Cloudflare great? Depends on what.
Is Cloudflare free plans protect against DDoS? Some sort of yes, very primitive and stupid. In cases when used something more complex rather then stupid public tools, it useless on free and even up to 200$ plan, after that it's pretty good, but the price is way too high. There are a lot of providers on LET who do DDoS protection must better then Cloudflare (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
Is Cloudflare good as CDN? Partially, for many reasons of blocked their IP pools in different regions, and also because of clients who abuse their network and their services (but if close eyes on weird clients in their network, they are pretty great).
Is Cloudflare good for hiding your real server IP (for different purposes)? If the well-configured server, yes. It's pretty good.
Is Cloudflare speedup loading of your website?
If you have modern (2015-2019) code on your website (js/html5/css/less/whatever) - you're pretty okay.
But if you have something ancient, be sure to face tons of issues because of Cloudflare incompatibility, can be tuned also in their control panel, but it's not okay.
What else features Cloudflare offer (on the free plan of course)?
SSL? - you're not protected at all, your traffic decrypted on their own, or issued by them.
You just adding an SSL just as "checklist", it's not about security.
If you will try to use your certificates, you will face tons of problems after some time because of them (it's their business model). if you wanna to use personally your certificate = pay money for that. (nothing against this).
The Cloudflare can really help a lot, if you have some kind of static site which can be cached fully, it will help really a lot then, and only then, otherwise, they are not better then any other CDN in my opinion (on free plan, and even their starter paid plan) then others, while it's looks like (for first time) like they have really awesome deal for websites, but in reality - it's not.
I'd be interested in hearing more about that, or a source
Source, or context?
I don't have a source on this but I believe it is true. Iirc you can infer a common account from the Cloudflare DNS servers assigned and the (shared/free) SSL certificate.