Last week I reviewed Media Temple as a web hosting company, and I mentioned I stopped using CloudFlare. This is a review of the CloudFlare service.
So before I go into the review I’ll explain to you what CloudFlare is. CloudFlare is basically a service that aims to speed up your website. It works because you change your name servers over to their name servers, and they’ll host all of your DNS records. You then have access to a lot of different controls. You can change some security settings that block out spammers, change caching settings, change minify settings and so much more. The main purpose of CloudFlare is to speed up your website.
The reason I chose to go with CloudFlare was GoDaddy web hosting was too slow, and that other CDN providers like Amazon cost too much money. CloudFlare is free, but there is also a pro version for $20 a month, I chose the pro version since I needed the SSL support. At first I really liked CloudFlare, they made ZL Studios run a whole lot faster than ever before. And they blocked out all of the spammers and bots.
So CloudFlare sped my website up, it went from 10 seconds of loading to 5 seconds of loading. It used all kinds of things to speed the website up. First off it cached all of the static resources so that they could be delivered from the closest server instead of GoDaddy. That’s basically how CloudFlare is a CDN. But that’s not all, they minified all of the JavaScript and CSS files together making the website have less requests when accessed. And the service even preloaded some of the static resources for even faster load times.
So that’s how CloudFlare sped up the website, now I’ll cover how CloudFlare secures the website. First off there is a security setting that sets up a whitelist and a blacklist. The whitelist is a list of IP addresses that are allowed into the website no matter what, and then there is a list of bad IP addresses that are always blocked. That prevented bad users from getting onto my website. And even if there is an IP address that accidentally got onto the blacklist the users are presented with a screen that has a captcha on it, so if they are human they will be able to type it in to access my website. That really helped get the bots off my website. There is a whole lot more that CloudFlare does to secure websites but I’m not going to cover everything since that’s not the reason I use CloudFlare.
So CloudFlare was great for GoDaddy, since GoDaddy is a slow web host that CloudFlare can speed up. But I ran into some problems as soon as I moved over to Media Temple. While I got Media Temple set up I had CloudFlare turned off. The website loaded faster than GoDaddy with CloudFlare without CloudFlare enabled on my Media Temple account. And when I turned on CloudFlare it was actually slightly slower, and my SSL certificate wasn’t working. So I decided to disable CloudFlare.
So that means CloudFlare is fast, but isn’t quite as fast as some of the faster web hosting companies out there. And if all of the static content is getting delivered from a server that’s slower than your main server it kind of makes the service pointless. I still do have CloudFlare running though, but not for the caching and all that. I actually have all that stuff turned off on my domains.
The reason why I still use CloudFlare is because I really like their DNS management web page. It has all of my domains listed on one page, and I can easily change the DNS settings. The interface is very clean and easy to use. Maybe part of why I like it so much is that GoDaddy has a very cluttered domain management interface.
And I guess another reason why I like CloudFlare is because it will be there even if I change web hosting companies or domain name registrars. Or I can manage the DNS of all of my domain names in one place. I have domains on CO.CC, GoDaddy, and Media Temple so CloudFlare is a nice place to manage all of my domains.
So now I’m going to wrap this up. CloudFlare is very fast, and is amazing for slower web hosting companies. If your web hosting company is slow, and you want a faster loading web site I’d really check out CloudFlare, they’re free so there is no real reason not to. But if your website is already very fast, and you’re happy with it I don’t really feel that you’d need to use CloudFlare. I guess if you want a more secure website then CloudFlare might be good though. And again it’s free so if you want you can just go ahead and try it out.
And another use for CloudFlare is as a DNS service. In my case I have about eight domain names from three different providers. Being able to mange them, or at least manage the DNS from one place is a great thing. I don’t need to look up the username and password for each registrar in order to change the DNS settings. And like I’ve said they have a great DNS management interface, it’s better than most of the web hosting companies I’ve tried out. Probably one of the only web hosting companies that has a better interface is VPS.net, but CloudFlare isn’t too far behind.
So just stay tuned into ZL Studios, since in the middle of all the tech news I’ll be sure to publish more reviews. I have a computer review coming on the ASUS Eee PC 1015PN, as well as a review on the Kodak PlayTouch, and I have many more web hosting and domain name reviews coming in the future covering services like Rackspace, GoDaddy, and Media Temple.
What are your thoughts on this?
