UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Off Topic Cloudflare

anyone participating in the beta for this?

www.cloudflare.com

they become your name server and filter all the evil IPs from your site, speed it up, etc..

I hadn't heard of it prior to your posting. I read through the site but am a little apprehensive. I guess I'll wait until it goes public and check it out then.

I am part of the team that is working on CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a service that is currently in a closed beta, so there hasn't been a lot of public discussion about it.

If you are interested in requesting an invitation code, you can do so here: https://www.cloudflare.com/request-invite.html.

if you are fighting with spammers, bad bots, etc... give it a shot.

Can you give me a little more information as to what it does, how it works and what you have to do to set it up?

i was hoping michellez would reply.

you use then for your DNS, and they monitor and filter traffic, cache static stuff on your site for faster load times, provide traffic analysis, a ton of other things. very easy to setup and so far I have noticed no ill effects.

The question is, what are the positive effects? The website doesn't say anything really, one way or the other. What are the benefits?

copied from their site.... many of these items are still work in progress or on the to do list, as it is still in beta
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Faster: CloudFlare uses a CDN-like infrastructure to deliver the best in performance to your site. The faster page load times will keep your visitors online longer and our caching mechanism will save you CPU and bandwidth resources

• Decrease site load times, so your visitors stay longer
• Save you bandwidth (by caching static content)
• Decrease the load to your CPU resources (by caching static content)
• Offline Browsing: Keep your site up, even if your server goes down

Safer: CloudFlare blocks known threats from your site and uses the collective intelligence of the community to identify new rising threats. Not only does CloudFlare block these threats, but we tie up their resources by throwing them into a never-ending labyrinth so they can't attack another site

• Hide email addresses from bots and email harvesters, but keep them visible to humans
• Block known malicious threats from accessing your site
• Server Side Exclude: Automatically hides content you choose from suspicious visitors
• Web vulnerability controls (XSS) and Posted Content Analysis (SQL injection) protection
• Real-time challenging of people posting spam links on forums
• Teach infected human visitors to your site about how to clean up their machine
• Block traffic by country
• Website vulnerability scanner
• Denial of service attack protection
• Dashboard with real-time stream of visitors
• Dashboard module to enable per-visitor blocking
• Easy commenting system for IPs
• Tying up known threats into a never-ending labyrinth, disabling them indefinitely
• Deploy collective intelligence of CloudFlare community to identify new threats

Smarter:You have good tools to evaluate human traffic coming to your site, but no insight into Search Engine Crawlers and bots. With CloudFlare, now you do.

• Volume of suspicious traffic
• Volume of suspicious traffic country of origin
• Amount of bandwidth saved thanks to CloudFlare caching
• Which search engine crawlers are (and are not) coming to your site
• What pages each search engine crawler has indexed
• Explanation of why blocked IPs were flagged
• Badges and accomplishments for enhanced experience
• Most popular and least popular pages for human visitors
• Peer benchmarking

Sorry for the delayed response! Bad Frog did a great job of describing why you would want to use CloudFlare. If you submit an inquiry through the feedback system on the site asking for a beta code (https://www.cloudflare.com/index.html), I'll make sure you get one. Then, you can check the service out for yourself.

I'm still not 100% sold on it but I did just sign up for the beta in order to at least learn more.

I'd be interested in what kind of server/speed redundancy they have in place... I'm using eNom for my DNS and they have multiple redundancies in place, it'd be a waste to me (and to everyone else) to move DNS and have a server crash and my traffic go the way of the dinosaurs because of it...

it is getting better, things were a little bumpy at times, I have only a few users that are having issues because they are on AOL or the like and keep getting randomly assigned a bad IP, but I have been working with my end users and have managed to get the direct link working correctly. I'm still not sure if this is a vast improvement over my overly paranoid htaccess file I was using, but it does make controlling access much easier.

I will add that the tech support people that I have dealt with when I have had issues or questions have been very quick to respond, very helpful and great to work with.