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I have been using cloudflare CDN on my website (wordpress) for about 4 months, mostly because I was hoping the CDN would make things faster, and make the load on my cheap server somewhat smaller, especially because of the many static .js and .css and .png files that wordpress contains.

However so far my experiences have been less than optimal. I am not actively monitoring, but I have noticed downtime on cloudflare CDN servers, cloudflare Nameservers, and even the cloudflare website itself. However, the cloudflare status page rarely shows downtime, usually everything is green OK.

Now I am wondering if I am doing something wrong here, or if more people have this experience? Assuming that Cloudflare knows what they are doing, I assume that downtime is caused by DDOS attacks on sites that use Cloudflare as well.

Is it a good idea in the first place to use a public CDN for a small site like mine that is not at high risk of ddos attacks?

Jeroen Ooms
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  • I never jumped on the CloudFlare bandwagon for this reason. I'd rather pay a pittance to Amazon CloudFront - sure, it costs a little money, but when I'm a paying customer they've got an incentive to properly serve my needs. – ceejayoz Dec 03 '11 at 00:41

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i've never used cloudflare for my personal projects, but i've supported clients that do and i've heard no notice of them having any issues recently.

based on the information found at http://blog.cloudflare.com/thats-freaking-awesome-cloudflare-automatical (it's one of their major feature claims), i'd say it's not something DDoS-related. rather, start doing DNS checks via something like http://www.leafdns.com/ when it's down. if i had to guess, it's actually something DNS-related.

brent saner
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  • Hmz what kind of DNS issues do you have in mind? The hostname seems to resolve fine, and has a very decent ping. It just takes forever for the pages to load from the CDN. – Jeroen Ooms Dec 07 '11 at 17:35
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    If it takes forever for pages to load from the CDN, then those pages/files may be marked with no-cache headers or a short cache-control expiration time. What cache-control headers do you see when you request the pages through Cloudflare? The other possibility is that the pages are "unpopular" relatively speaking, and so are evicted from Cloudflare's caching proxies in favor of more popular content. This can be an issue even with bigger for-pay CDNs, but is a much larger problem for a free service. There is simply more content competing for the same cache space, so the most popular wins. – rmalayter Dec 09 '11 at 14:00