I’ve been on a quest for the need for speed lately. I recently swapped to a new host Host Gator and that helped with the load speeds of the site increased (a bit). But it also gave me an opportunity to make the site even more lean and mean by going through the plugins I was using and removing the fluff. A big part of that though was deciding to add a CDN to help optimize and speed up the load times of the site. But like most bloggers on a budget I had to find something that not only worked but was in my price range – free! This is where CloudFlare comes into play. Read more to find out what a CDN is, and if CloudFlare is right for you!
Site Speed
Even if you have the greatest content in the world and a site that is designed right the one thing that will turn people away faster than anything else is a website that takes forever to load. Things like not optimizing your images, having too many WordPress plugins, and using too many java script all can affect your load times greatly. So when starting to optimize your own website that is where I would start. But after you have worked on fixing them what next?
CDN – Content Delivery Network
The next step to consider is to implement a CDN to take that final step to speeding up your website. A CDN will take all of your images, java script, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and host them on to their network to quickly load them on your visitors browsers. Another benefit is that a CDN has a huge network of servers that are closer to your potential visitor ensuring that your site will load quickly wherever in the workd they are visiting. The downfall is that they can cost a lot to implement.
Cloud Flare
I happened to first see CloudFlare from a fellow blogger’s site The Bad Blogger. I decided to do some research and found that they offered a FREE service! I thought there was some sort of catch or I would have to plaster their logo all over the place. But as it turns out not only was it simple to setup – there was not catch! It really is FREE. But not only do they offer their CDN services check out the other features they offer:
CDN
Well first they offer your basic CDN service. By caching things like your images, CSS, and javascript on their servers you are sure to have a site that will load quickly no matter where in the world visitors are checking out your site. Another cool feature of using a CDN? Say your host went down for whatever reason. You would still have a cached page instead of the dreaded 404 message people would usually get! I know it works… I inadvertently tested it while switching to a new host!
Optimization
CloudFlare offers for your pages to be further optimized before being loaded onto your visitors browser. I already mentioned some of them above! The other benefit of using a service like CloudFlare? It will save your bandwidth and the amounts of requests to your webhost!
Security
Add another layer of security from Spammers, SQL Injection attacks, and DDOS attacks from the script kiddies. By having to go through their CDN first it is just another layer of protection to keep your site and your visitors safe! It also offers services like obscuring email addresses and preventing hotlinking of your images.
Analytics
CloudFlare offers you some awesome stats to see how your site is performing. I take them with a grain of salt though. Although Google Analytics uses java script to track visitors, CloudFlare’s numbers will be greatly inflated showing you more of a “raw data” indicating almost 5-10x more traffic then you are actually receiving!
Applications
There are a slew of applications available that CloudFlare will implement on their end. Some are pretty frivolous to being really beneficial. You can add Google Analytics, PunchTab Rewards, and even experiment.ly!
Implementing Cloud Flare
So with a ton of forethought and planning (i.e. I’m full of crap) I decided to go for it. So how did I implement it? Seriously it was probably the easiest setup process I’ve ever gone through!
- First I signed up for my CloudFlare account. After I received my confirmation email I then signed onto CloudFlare.
- I then imported my DNS settings which CloudFlare exported and setup for me automatically. I do recommend doing some research to understand what you are looking at though.
- After I had everything setup with CloudFlare I then went to my GoDaddy account and changed the DNS settings to point to CloudFlare instead of my webhost. This is the scary step as GoDaddy states this could take up to 24hrs for them to make the changes. For me it took 10 minutes for the changes to take place.
- After all of that all I had to do was see if I could still see if the website was up and running and *poof* I had implemented CloudFlare onto my site.
- When this is all completed you can go back into the CloudFlare dashboard and finish tweaking the settings by enabling applications or making any necessary changes to your DNS. (I had to manually add things like FTP and SSH that I had forgotten about.)
Do You Really See An Improvement?
Considering I had already tweaked this site? I can definitely say yes I do see an increase. Of course I would do your own testing first to see if I’m lying to you or not. I did a random test (as of this writing) to see how fast it loaded. Actual content of the site loaded fairly quickly with the added geegaws and doo hickeys loading a few seconds afterwards (i.e. ads, the sharebar, and my PunchTab toolbar at the bottom of the screen.) What this means is that the stuff you want to see – the images and text loaded really fast, and the rest of it kind of popped up a little bit afterwards. So I still have some work to do… *sigh*
Updates
I had a fellow blogger Bryan from www.thehobbyblogger.com ask about how the CDN refreshes the site if I make changes.
If you are going to implement small changes to your blog? They will take place ‘on the fly’. I have not had any issues performing basic site updates/maintenance. If you are doing extensive updates? You can either temporarily disable Cloud Flare through their control panel by clicking on the “Development” option. Or disable Cloud Flare altogether. I do recommend using the Development mode as that will only temporarily disable the service for a few hours.
Update #2
Lost Traffic?
People have told me horror stories about potential lost traffic or visitors getting blocked to their sites. I have done a short test with my own site and I can say I did not see any noticeable difference in traffic with the service off or on. I would suggest though that if you think you are losing traffic? You should conduct your own testing. This can be done by either:
A) Adjusting the Security settings from what you currently have it set at to a lower setting.
or
B) Disable Cloud Flare altogether and test to see if your traffic changes dramatically.
Also please note I do not have a huge traffic site. So your results may vary.
Is a CDN For You?
Well, that depends really. If you don’t get much traffic and if your site loads quick as it is? Then um, no? But if you want the added security and speed you get with a CDN then I say sure! I had a great test this past week with visitors averaging around 1500 – 2000 visitors (hey I hear you snickering!) and everything remained snappy even when I had 30 visitors hammering (OK, knocking softly) on the site!
For me the benefits outweigh any negatives using CloudFlare might bring.
And did I mention all of this is FREE already? For larger sites they do offer paid plans that offer additional functionality – but for most folks the free plan will definitely do the trick!
Other Resources/Additional Reading
I am suggesting that you read these two articles to help you make a decision as well. Why? Well I respect the sites and more importantly I want you to have a better overall opinion rather than some little blog you happened to run across while searching for information. Both will give you a more technical explanation and I found them interesting.
-
ArsTecnica: One Big Cluster | How CloudFlare Launched 10 Data Centers in 30 Days
- dzone.com – ClouFlare Review – Not Snake Oil?
Conclusion
CloudFlare is a fantastic option for bloggers on a budget. From what I’ve researched on the web CloudFlare is considered “CDN-lite” by some folks. All I know is that it works! I might look into using a different CDN later on but for now CloudFlare is an awesome solution!
What are your thoughts on using a CDN? What service do you use if any? Leave a comment below with your experience with using a CDN or if you have any questions!
- Free
Twitter: thehobbyblogger
says:
Nice post Jason. How long does it take for design changes to take effect? Is there a way to trigger CloudFlare to recache your site?
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That is the part I forgot to write about. For me locally I see changes instantly. The article I posted showed up as soon as I hit the Publish button.
I’ve done design changes (subtle ones) or where I broke the site entirely – which I’m great at btw. And they show up as soon as I make the changes.
CloudFlare has a developement mode that you can turn on when you’re editing the site. Changes will show instantly with that one. There is also a way to purge the cache of you forget to turn that on. Otherwise, changes will not show instantly because they are cached.
I decided to try this, too. (I’m hosted with bluehost & although quite experienced with HTML and websites, I’d much rather write my material).
I think Bluehost’s motive is to save bandwidth, which makes sense.
CloudFlare has several features – they say they remove redundant spaces etc, the sort of thing easy enough to do but which many people don’t do. I try not to use java, css and all the rest and am not sure why caching should be any faster than any other sort of retrieval; but maybe it is – could it be help in RAM, for example? Also I’m not sure how long it takes optical fibres, or satellites, or whatever, to cross the globe: presumably there’s some saving, but maybe not much – I have no real idea and nobody seems to want to say. My site is unusual – much of it was a forum, but it site-grabbed and frozen – and it has quite a bit of wrong HTML – I couldn’t face going through every file and taking stuff out, so there’s a lot of wrong syntax, which is normally ignored, and is ignored by CloudFlare too. Another issue is spambots. I took a dislike to ahrefbot, and used my robots file to ask it to F* off, but it’s still there- so I don’t think CloudFlare monitors bots that well. However it may well cut down on the sort of spammers forums are plagued by.
Anyway, it did seem faster, though this is an impression locally – I have attempted to test remote loading times. It’s easy to implement – bluehost changes the DNS pointer(s) for you – and says it’s equally easy to remove.
Yet another issue is sound and video files. I have a few of these- about 15 – and I get the impression bluehost throttles the downloads, judging by the small number of complete downloads. CloudFlare specifically says it doesn’t like sites with an ‘excessive’ or ‘undue’ (I forget the exact word) proportion of large files. Maybe they’ll decide they don’t like me.
As to their model – who knows? I have a slight suspicion their host machines may be disused, out of work servers in backstreet buildings, hired at minimal cost. Or maybe it’s the ‘intelligence’ people keeping tabs? Or some multimillionaire finally trying to crackdown on nuisance users of the Internet?
Great (and in spots extremely funny!) article, Jason! BlueHost just started offering CloudFlare for free and I was just about the hit the button, when I thought . . . maybe I ought to do “a ton of forethought and planning.” The DNS notification to GoDaddy makes me a bit apprehensive because I think I forgot how I did that. I score pretty well on speed now. Maybe I’ll just come back to your site every a few days and see if anything blows up. Hail to the pioneers who take the arrows so we settlers can take the land.
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Thanks! I’ve actually been using it for about a month before I wrote the article. I wanted to make sure that I not only understood it but that it actually worked!
The issue I still have is that I use too many external javascript calls – so Google Analytics states my load times as being pretty slow. But the reality is that the actual content/pictures show up within seconds of loading. The external stuff (PunchTab and Facebook) seem to still take awhile to load.
I used Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test the performance before and after and CF made no difference to the score.
I spose that means your site is 100% optimized and running on an awesome host. Good job! But the benefit of a CDN besides page load speed is the fact that the content is cached on them as well.
If your host went down – visitors would still see a page instead of the Error 500 message.
But – A CDN might not be necessary – especially if you don’t have a ton of traffic, or if your only serving to a local community.
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I agree, I see no real benefit. Maybe I am wrong, but this is dynamic content that starts on your site and then is fed through the cloudfare system back to your site. How is that faster?
The idea is that the content is stored on a server that is physically closer to the potential visitor of your site. Since my site is hosted in Florida, and someone in Sweden wanted to visit the site – the cached content will be fed from a CloudFlare server that is located closer to that visitor in Sweden.
The idea is that content will load just as fast in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else instead of where it is being hosted from locally.
That and the additional features that I mentioned in the article above means it is worth it to me.
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I can see that, makes more sense.
Hey Jason very well explained. Being a newbie I am not at all in mood to spend much on the blog and I guess I must give CloudFare a try. Your detailed explanation actually is tempting me to use it :)
Thanks! It really was pretty easy to setup.
Does it work with WP Super cache plugin or we need to uninstall the plugin. One more thing, are you using auto-minify and rocket loader service from them? They say it’s beta feature, so have u seen any issues with them if you are using them?
thanks
So far no issues! But you might have different results as I don’t know what theme, plugins, etc you are running.
And I have only used Yoasts W3 Cache which is a more complicated version of Super Cache.
Nice write up, Jason. Just set up CloudFlare on my site and keeping my fingers crossed that it speeds things up a bit. The whole process is so easy, I don’t know why you wouldn’t use it.
I’ve been using it for a bit now and I do love it. Not to mention a lot of the free services you get along with it. I have it server my Analytics code, back up my site, run tests with experiment.ly and a few other things as well!
Plus I know if the host crashes? People will still be presented with a static page instead of a 404.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting CJ!
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Good point about the static page. I never thought of that. This website development is a never ending game. Loving it. Cheers!
CJ – Indeed it is. I’m still learning something new everyday!
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Same here. I am on the web since around 1994. Still learning a lot. Especially about this stuff: Load balancing, DDoS protection, etc. Thanks!
Same here. I am on the web since around 1994. Still learning a lot. Especially about this stuff: Load balancing, DDoS protection, etc. Thanks!
Oh god… don’t get me started with load balancing – I still have nightmares. But CloudFlare was pretty awesome when it comes to DDoS protection :)
I too just love them. I am using maxcdn for my blog, but even then for security reasons I am using cloudflare. Actually they are not just CDN, but a free service which gives full control to optimize, protect and track your website.
If anyone doubts on their service, then I would like to tell that, websites like StumbleUpon ( which receive millions of page-views every month ) use them..
Vivek – thanks for stopping by! I am still using CloudFlare and I love the service. You are correct it isn’t JUST a CDN but offers all types of different services (most are free!) as well.
I’ll definitely need to update to a “real” CDN that does ONLY caching of content – but I don’t currently have the budget for it yet.
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I am actually using CloudFlare CDN on 2 of my blogs and so far it is working as expected. Although, there are times that I need to purge it because it is saying there is no cached version so the user needs to click the live version. Anyone experiencing the same?
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I get that through my work. But for me its more of the work’s Proxy and not CloudFlare that is causing the issue. I’ve never had it happen otherwise. And I’m borderline obsessive about uptime :-)
For me I’ve not really had any issues – although some people have said that there have been times when the site was listed as “down” and now the possibility that CloudFlare is possibly blocking potential traffic as SPAM?
I’ll need to do some more testing to see if this is the case. Its just going to be a pain in the ass – I’ll have to re-point the DNS back to the host instead of CloudFlare and see if traffic improves or not.
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Yeah, you said it right it’s going to be a pain in the ass. I am actually trying to test it. One of the possible way to test is it is when I am trying to use bulk smush.it plugin. If I trigger it on my dashboard, after a few minutes I will be redirected to CloudFlare error page. Note that I have already turned on the development mode on. :(
LOL bulk smush.it might be more of your server timing out with the service and CloudFlare freaks out.
I have to run them individually on my site. I am able to run the bulk smush.it late at night when it seems the internet is a little calmer. My old host? It would choke instantly. At least now with Host Gator I don’t have that kind of issue any more.
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I use CloudFlare service for all my site/blog and so far they have great service! :D
Very cool!
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Almost similar analysis I had done some time back on my domain.Just sharing after effects on CF implementation & what I experienced in between:
1. Immediate drop in traffic.
2. Immediate rise in page reading.
3. Speed Improved and served content globally without any issue.
4. Increase number of Brute Force attacks.
5. Many crawlers can still bypass CF wall. [Forum spammers / BF attacks etc. ] I think CF folks should check other BL’s Although I have many other majors to trace.
6. CloudFlare also blocks some good crawlers. After some tries I find the way to allow them.
Personally I think that the “Brute Force” attacks are either not caught with the web host or are a false positive on the CF side?
I haven’t seen a drop in traffic – if anything I’m getting more traffic. But I don’t know if anyone is actually getting blocked.
And as to crawlers? I know that all of the major ones are able to crawl the site OK (I tested.)
Thanks for stopping by and sharing. It seems that Cloud Flare is still a good free solution even with its minor issues.
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I am using cloudflare since more than 8 or 9 months with maxcdn and last month I have purchased the pro plan and removed the maxcdn.
From my experience I can say that cloudflare pro is better than the free cloud flare plan + maxcdn combined.
Fahad – good to hear that your having great service with Cloud Flare. I still like using it too!
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I really wanted to read what you had to say about CloudFlare – THEN those bl@@dy social media flags popped out. KIN USELESS – if you must have them – put them on the other side
Where were they popping out from? The left? What were you using to look at the post? I have tested the site on most platforms so I’m interested on how it isn’t working for you. Thanks!
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Hi
Nice review.
I see we’re more or less in the same boat re readership (although I spread it over several blogs) and Thesis Love (how do you like 2.0?) and the use of CloudFlare.
Only I’ve just deactivated Cloudflare after having it running since March 2012.
Reason? I’ve a feeling it takes away traffic, specifically traffic generated by Google Image Search lately. However I am not Geek enough to prove it.
In case you are interested I’ve written an post on the subject: Does Cloudflare Take Away Your Traffic?.
Cheers!
I still haven’t looked at 2.0 too closely. Last time I looked though? I didn’t really like it. I never really like WYSIWYG editors – and that’s what Thesis 2.0 looks like.
I’ve done a lot of Google search on images for my site and everything appears to be fine. Maybe it was a caching issue? I tend to clear it out once a week on both the site and on Cloud Flare (due to me playing with things on the site)
I’ll have to try turning it off and see if my traffic increases for a month and post the results. Thanks for stopping by and commenting!
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Sorry for the (really) late response. Um Thesis 2.0? Not so much. I’m still on 1.8 and have something in the works to switch off of it… eventually.
Hmm..I don’t seem to have that issue – all of the images I have are currently listed on Google just fine?
I’m taking a look at your article now lol. Thanks again for dropping by and commenting!
Just planning set up CloudFlare on my site and keeping my fingers crossed that it will speed things up a bit. BTW is there is cheap CDN company?
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I haven’t actually researched other CDN’s that much. I know that MaxCDN offers a pretty affordable service, and Amazon offers a CDN service as well. I would suggest looking at those two for paid services. But give CloudFlare a shot first. If you find out
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CloudFlare + MaxCDN will work just great. CloudFlare protects site from revealing the IP address of the server and block the attacks as well as MaxCDN makes the site load faster. CloudFlare protects sites from getting defaced too!
is it really necessary to use both of them?
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Not at all. You can use cloudflare only. If you want double speed then use MaxCDN also.
Thanks a lot frnd for this confirmation.
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Now I am using both of them, and getting stunning result on one of my high traffic site.
Thanks.
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Glad your getting some good results Sadek! I still run and love CloudFlare!
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Well CloudFlare is free – that cheap enough?
I have recently purchased my site and hosting (Hostgator). And in cPanel, it have shortcut to setup it (CloudFlare) but when I was go to install it, it shown that it will not take guarantee of always good user experience and it is in still beta condition.
So, should I use it because I am totally new here, so please tell me. Is my site’s speed is slow? Because I can’t compare it open in the same speed as other.
Thanks
I would go through the route to manually install Cloudflare instead of the one using cpanel. I’ve had issues using the one through the host as my site does not use the ‘www’ and CloudFlare causes it to “loop” and never reach the site.
I did a test on pingdom tools – http://tools.pingdom.com/ and your load time is fine at 3.5 seconds. Compare that with my typical 4-5 second score and your OK. It never hurts to get it down lower though!
Okay then may be my website didn’t need it, but still if it didn’t harm a little than should I use it?
Akash – you can still benefit from using Cloud Flare as it will help keep your site secure – and present a great overall consistent experience from across the globe.
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Thanks for a detailed review, Jason.. I am surely going to try this on one of my sites on which the traffic is growing very well…
Although I have a few questions, can I add multiple sites to a free account?
Can I have CloudFlare hosting my uploaded content like images etc. so that even the images load fast enough – as more than the content it is majorly the images which slow down certain pages?
Cheers!
Aman
Amandeep – thanks for stopping by and commenting. I’m glad you enjoyed the article! To answer your questions though. Yes you should be able to add multiple sites – but I would suggest using the email address associated with each site. For the image uploading to cache? You will need to order their “Pro” service or switch to a more traditional CDN like MaxCDN, Amazon or something like that. CloudFlare is an excellent entry level CDN Service that offers some great applications to work with it.
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Aman – I would think you would want the “Pro” account. Or you would have to setup multiple single free accounts using different email addresses. It would be a pain but it would work.
And for things like images etc? I’m 99% sure you would have to pay for a Pro account – or look for a different CDN. I wasn’t joking when I said this was more “CDN-Lite”.
Sorry for the late reply on this!
How much money did they offer you to write this advertisement in the form of a review?
In any case I gave cloudflare a try after installing w3 total cache plugin for wordpress.
My site took 8 seconds to load before installing cloudflare. Not sure how slow it is now, but I’ll test it out tomorrow.
My site hang for about 3 seconds before it actually takes you to the size. Not sure why it takes so long to communicate with the server before it transfer you to the site.
Um actually I didn’t get paid anything and I’m pretty sure they aren’t even aware of the review.
Anyways, how did you go about installing it? Did you use the host or do it manually? Did you go through the different configuration options?
8 seconds seems rear slow. Either your site or your host has some issues. A CDN isn’t going to fix them.
Just did a retest. Still slow.
Canmu take a look? I dont think its the server. I tested other site hosted on the same server, their load time is 3 seconds.
My url is http://www.eatlovepray.me
U will see that it will tske a while to get to my site. But once u are there, everything loads fast. There is just some lag to get to my site for some reason.
Thanks.
I dunno it loaded really quick for me here in the US over cellular even! Could be that there isn’t a node near you?
Awesome, thanks so much for your help!