Share your thoughts and experiences with Cloudflare

[HH Services Limited]

I will start with my own experience and Ps 1.6 .08:

 

Easy to configure, I just changed name servers and everything was set from there on, no additional changes besides leaving the security option essentially off and the catching and performance to the highest available option for best performance. With these settings and after testing for one week it went like this:

On google page speed it starting to beat another website that I didnt have with cloudflare on the "server´s time to response", but on day 3 it turned around and now it has been another 3 days in which the cloudflare site give s the warning option of server takes 0,56 seconds to response while the site not linked to cloudflare gives no warning.

With other testing sites I get a mix of results sometimes in favor of cloudflare, sometimes against it, so overall my experience is telling me that it may not be worth it at all.

Has anybody had a clearer experience with cloudflare when it comes to performance?

 

Thanks

 

 

[Dh42]

I have personally found that they are a waste in general for most sites. You are basically adding another machine in front of your site, so there is no possible way that it will make a dynamic system like prestashop spit out the code faster, it will always be slower because of the added machine. If you use the full page caching it could be faster yes, but it will break your site too. 

 

It does reduce the size of images and can combine and compress files as well, but you can do that with PrestaShop as well, so it makes that feature not so great.

 

It does protect against ddos attacks, that is what it is meant for and it does a good job at that. I do keep an account with one of their competitors just in case I have to move my dns behind them in the event of an attack. But at the same time, you have to realize that their sole reason of existing is to prevent attacks. Their dns is constantly under attack, slowing resolution for other sites. 

 

In general, I say no, I would just use MaxCDN or something. It is what I do. 

[Tamara F]

I have personally found that they are a waste in general for most sites. You are basically adding another machine in front of your site, so there is no possible way that it will make a dynamic system like prestashop spit out the code faster, it will always be slower because of the added machine. If you use the full page caching it could be faster yes, but it will break your site too. 

 

It does reduce the size of images and can combine and compress files as well, but you can do that with PrestaShop as well, so it makes that feature not so great.

 

It does protect against ddos attacks, that is what it is meant for and it does a good job at that. I do keep an account with one of their competitors just in case I have to move my dns behind them in the event of an attack. But at the same time, you have to realize that their sole reason of existing is to prevent attacks. Their dns is constantly under attack, slowing resolution for other sites. 

 

In general, I say no, I would just use MaxCDN or something. It is what I do. 

 

Hi,

 

Thanks for your advice! i did not know about all this problems an I was going to use cloudflare but I will not do it finally. You probably save me a lot of pain hehehe

But I do not really understand if you think other services as MaxCDN are useful or not to improve speed in prestashop stores. Would you pay this service to improve SEO and user experience?

 

Thanks

[Harkanwal]

I have problem with email protection at Back Office due to Cloudflare.

[selectshop.at]

I have problem with email protection at Back Office due to Cloudflare.

 

 

You are wasting your time with this. Take a good server with enough speed and you will run better. The more outsourced servers and services you are using the more problems you will have, besides you will loss speed as all the requests of a user to your site will trespass several different connections and configured machines.

 

CDN and media servers inside own network are ok, but they will bring nothing if the requests are trespassing several internet connections and third party networks.

 

BTW CDN is an old technique, form times on where good server hardware was expensive. Not nowadays the case anymore.