CloudFlare is not for me

October 19th, 2010

Posted under web.

This may sound a bit unfounded, but I found the CloudFlare service a bit slow for me. Here’s my experience:

I visited their site, purely out of curiosity and was instantly intrigued by the awesome video that they have on the site. The extremely friendly and VERY well thought out UI made me want to sign up within a couple minutes of hearing about their service for the first time. So 11/10 on this point.

The process is extremely simple, well commented and very well thought out. You will be done in minutes and you will see the benefits roll in instantly. So perfect points all around again.

This is where I run into issues. My usual hosting (pac web hosting) is epic, when it comes to speed. I get 20 ms ping from my home and sub 10 ms from work, when the name servers run directly. After the switch-over to CloudFlare, I started getting ping in the range of 260ms – 300ms, they were unstable and over ten times my normal ping.

Page load times also increased dramatically. Normally this site loads in about 0.7 seconds (safari 4, mac os), after the switch, it jumped to 3-4 seconds, again unstable and much slower. I thought maybe its the London internet being slow in the afternoon, leave it, check it later when I’m at home. The story is worse, the site takes about 15 seconds to load the page. This made me freak out and I switched the nameservers back to pac.

Half an hour later, I’m back on pac directly, the speed is back to it’s old standard.

Now I’m not trying to badmouth this FANTASTIC service, I love the idea, I admire the execution and I will come back to it again in a few months to see what’s new.

I’m not sure where the extreme slowdown came from (maybe things weren’t set up fully yet)? Maybe I just got put on a laggy server? No idea, but it sure made me freak out and bail on it straight away.

It’s a shame, I hope that my next test of this awesome service will produce different results and I will get to love it as so many do.

http://cloudflare.com Damon Billian

Hi,

There are rare times when we will not help improve performance. At the same time, however, we are more than happy to test where the problems were to see if there was a setup problem.

Please do feel free to contact me directly with any questions or concerns.
Gineta

I have the server with Amazon in Ireland, before Cloudfare my web run faster and in true I got the seam problems . The webs now is really very slow and I am also in UK. Many times also Cloudfare say the server is down and is not true I access faster by SSH and other services not http. Really Cloudfare have serious problems of badwith .

http://daulex.com daulex

I’ve heard many people say this and have experienced this myself. I think, at least for now, CloudFlare is only a viable option, if the target audience of your website is in the US.

Kepler

I have to agree. All my sites slowed down when moved to cloudflare. I think it may be more of a DNS issue that is slowing things down rather than architecture or resources. I have a website that rerouted back to itself for some operations and the pages would literally hang for 30 seconds or more when using cloudflare. If they get that issue resolved I will probably start using them again for some web sites.

One other issue I had with them early on is that their servers went down. Of course all the web sites I had going through them died as well. I received no email from cloudflare that there was a problem and they were working on it with a rough time estimate. Worse, when I went to their web site there was absolutely no way to contact them (also no mention of the problem). This really turned me off. The cloud just introduces another point of failure in my mind.
Lalo Marquez

Totally agree. I started using their free service today after changing my hostgator account dns with theirs, and what used to be a split second load of my site, now I have to wait at least 5 seconds for the page to begin to load, while my browser shows just a white screen. For now, the only thing I like is the security: there’s a log of attacks and suspicious ips that tried to visit my site seemingly not with the best of intentions, and they were challenged with a captcha or something like that. I’m also using MaxCDN, which definetely is speeding the load times.

http://daulex.com daulex

I think the main issue is with the dns servers, try doing traceroute on your domain when it’s running through cloudflare and then compare it to a traceroute with your domain going directly to your hosting.

My results were quite staggering, the number of hops doubles and the time it takes to get to the end as it hops through routers from the UK to USA and back, several times, so no wonder really.
http://www.husdal.com Jan Husdal

Lalo,
If security is what matters most to you, you may want to look into Incapsula. They offer for free what CloudFlare only has in their paid PRO plan. Performancewise they’re about equal, according to my own tests.

Biomech

I’ve just started up with CloudFlare. My site has going from a 22ms ping to 121ms and page load times have INCREASED from 1.5 seconds to 2.8 seconds.

I’ll let it run for a bit, but it doesn’t look like I will be continuing.