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CloudFlare

Posted: Wed May 30, 2012 1:40 am
by bambooweb
I just signed up for CloudFlare, so within 24 hours if everything goes well the site should be faster, especially on the east coast and outside the US.

Bill

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Wed May 30, 2012 3:25 am
by sully0family
Thanks Bill. Now that my laptop has died and I use my wife's now, it will be fun to have change. Change is good.

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Wed May 30, 2012 1:36 pm
by needmore
O.K. I'll bite - what is CloudFlare and will dial-up notice an improvement?

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 2:52 am
by bambooweb
CloudFlare has servers in Washington DC, Newark, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Jose and 4 in Europe and 3 in Asia. They cache the static parts of our site and serve it locally they also block a number of threats.

From their website
On average, a website on CloudFlare

- loads twice as fast
- uses 60% less bandwidth
- has 65% fewer requests
- is way more secure

All for free!
Reviews from users say they see 20% faster loading with the free version. People visiting the site from known threat IP addresses are asked to verify themselves before proceeding so everyone should still be able to get in.

Bill

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 12:37 pm
by needmore
Sounds promising, I assume you've replaced BlueHost?

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 10:18 pm
by bambooweb
Actually it works with bluehost and most other hosts so there was no changes on the website. It only took about 5 minutes to set up and then I had to wait about 12 hours for the DNS to get updated.
The stats show that it blocked over 500 threats in the first 12 hours from known website spammers to bots that harvest email addresses. We have code in place to block both of those but it is nice that they are blocked before even reaching here.
An interesting thing that I saw looking at the threat records is that each of the IP addresses where the threat came from attempted 4 times and the most of the computers did not have any antivirus that was detectable.

Bill

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2012 12:34 pm
by bamboothew
Unless I'm imagining things, the site does seem to be moving much more quickly now! Awesome!

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 3:39 pm
by johnw
I composed a reply yesterday and mistakenly saved it as a draft. Now I cannot find that draft on the site. Any ideas where it might be hiding or how to find it?

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 11:19 pm
by bambooweb
If you go to your User Control Panel (Upper Right) you can get the draft from the Manage Drafts section.

Bill

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2012 8:16 pm
by needmore
Bill, I am almost unable to access the site from my office - I get a CloudFare error mumbling about the cache then a link to try a live connection - that usually fails, today it was about 4 hours b4 I could get here.

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2012 8:33 pm
by bambooweb
The problem is with bluehost. Since yesterday the site has been up intermittently and I am also unable to log in to the cpanel. When I check the server status at bluehost.com. it has been giving an error that there is an unknown problem and it should take 15 to 45 minutes to fix. so far it has been out 4 times that I have checked and my email has been out quite a bit.

Bill

Re: CloudFlare

Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2012 9:12 pm
by needmore
Always a weak link in a chain isn't there...