89
Five reasons we offer a free version of the service and always will:
Data: we see a much broader range of attacks than we would if we only had our paid users. This allows us to offer better protection to our paid users.
Customer Referrals: some of our most powerful advocates are free customers who then "take CloudFlare to work." Many of our largest ...
53
@toomanyairmiles is partially correct - the purpose of this technique is to allow parallel connections from the web-browser to the server. Web browsers should allow a minimum of two simultaneous connections to a single host, but many new browsers can manage up to 60. Regardless, concurrent simultaneous connections between browser and web-server(s) is a major ...
25
I have tried this solution
http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/19043/how-to-set-up-email-forwarding-for-your-domain-using-mailgun
So far, it seems to work for me even though my domain is still not yet verified. (Still in the early 24-48 hours to verify the MX records etc)
Basically the solution is to use mailgun and setup the email forwarding using their ...
25
CloudFlare describes Rocket Loader like this...
Rocket Loader is a general-purpose asynchronous JavaScript loader
coupled with a lightweight virtual browser which can safely run any
JavaScript code after window.onload.
Rocket Loader does a bunch of things:
It ensures that all the scripts on your page will not block the content of your ...
23
Aside from use of CDNs, using separate domains for static data also means:
You can use a lightweight web server that doesn't have to load all the modules/extensions that your dynamic content web server has to load on every single request. Not having to scan each directory in the URI path to read .htaccess files also increases the number of simultaneous ...
23
Yes, it's a caching reverse proxy.
"It depends". By default only things like images and CSS are cached, but you can set the cache level per zone and set Page Rules to override what is cached or should not be cached. Static HTML can be forced to be cached by a page rule, but dynamic content obviously cannot. The exception here is if you have the Business or ...
21
Many sites have quite a lot of cookies set, these cookies have the purpose of supporting some kind of state.
By putting the static (stateless) resources on a completely different domain you can reduce the size of the http requests. In some cases there are so many cookie that a single http request takes two TCP packets to be transmitted. So having a separate ...
19
It does not offer unlimited bandwidth. Unlimited bandwidth does not exist and is an impossibility. It is only a marketing term that states "the limit is higher than most users require". There is always a catch somewhere when anything is unlimited. With something that says unlimited, you are worse off than a service that has a specific known limit (or pay per ...
17
Change your htaccess file code on your website root directory (i.e. Your public_html ".htaccess" file)
<FilesMatch "\.(ttf|otf|eot|woff|woff2)$">
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "http://skin.cdn.com"
</IfModule>
</FilesMatch>
Now your CDN will be allowed to load your resource calling ...
16
PLEASE NOTE THE EDITS & UPDATES BELOW
As of me writing this (May 23 2012), SSL is supported via the CloudFront distribution URL only. Meaning, you cannot CNAME the SSL URL. Concretely, you can reference an item via SSL as:
https://[distribution].cloudfront.net/picture.jpg
but not:
https://cdn.mydomain.com/picture.jpg
where cdn.mydomain.com is a ...
16
CloudFlare, in most cases, does not cache HTML. This is because we don't want to show stale dynamic content. That said, the system can help the performance of even dynamic content in four primary ways:
CloudFlare can route traffic over preferred network routes that are often more efficient than what a request would normally take.
For sites that get a lot of ...
13
In the past, Web browsers were only able to download two items at once (now 6 or more), so downloading resources from various domains is faster than a single domain. This applies to everything from images to javascripts.
Many companies also use a CDN, a tool which ensures the end user gets their data from a server that is geographically close to them, ...
13
To clarify -- yes, we offer a CNAME pointing option that is available for paid level plans (business level and above) whereby you can point CNAME records through CloudFlare while continuing to use your own DNS. That being said, we operate a global DNS network with 23 data centers, and have routinely been shown by independent groups to be #1 or #2 in terms of ...
12
I don't know of a compressed version out there but you might want to create a saved Google search to keep yourself updated.
You could submit it to http://www.cdnjs.com and it has a shot being hosted by them for free.
Also, it looks like you could get an uncompressed version from here, http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/1.4.0/bootstrap.min.css.
Finally, ...
12
Register a free account at mailgun.org
add a mailgun MX record to your Cloudflare DNS
set up a forwarding rule at mailgun
Enjoy.
11
The CDN should be used for all static files (.css/.js/images).
Sometimes however javascript or css files can have dynamic aspect to them such as that it would include a unique user string or something of that sort. In this situation the CDN server would have to contact the origin server on every request which would defeat the purpose.
If your CSS and ...
10
While Imgur is an image hosting service, their service is intended for the images to be commented upon, rated and shared within that site by members of their community.
Their TOS (under "Stuff not to do") does state "don't upload .. advertising (and) solicitations". Even if your e-commerce site doesn't sell products or services, the TOS also specifically ...
10
I'm a long time user of Cloudflare. I have many sites on their free plan and a few on their Pro plans.
They can offer this free plan because they earn enough from their Premium plans to cover the costs.
By offering a free plan to thousands of users, they can analyse more web traffic, which makes their algorithms smarter and their premium plans worth so ...
8
No, this will not improve your ranking. Links from other websites, specifically websites with related content that rank well for the same things you hope to rank well for, help you rank better. Sharing a resource does not with SEO nor is Google Analytics used towards this purpose. Now if you provide a useful tool other websites may link to you because of it ...
8
No. This will not make your site faster and is unnecessary. Multiple HTTP calls slow down your website, not speed it up.
To make your CSS load as fast as possible:
Minify it
Compress it using gzip (mod_deflate)
Serve it from a CDN
Once the browser has the file it will cache it and no more requests will need to be made which is as fast as it gets.
7
You shouldn't switch to a CDN too early. Read the update on hacked.com's experience with a CDN. If you don't have millions of visitors per day and your visitors are not distributed across a wide geography, then a CDN might slow your site down.
Instead, it would be wise to plan for using a CDN at some time in the future when designing your site, but not ...
7
Justin Dorfman manages http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/ which has version 2.3.1 (at the time of editing)
Complete CSS (Responsive, With Icons):
//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/twitter-bootstrap/2.3.1/css/bootstrap-combined.min.css
Complete JavaScript
//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/twitter-bootstrap/2.3.1/js/bootstrap.min.js
GitHub Repo
https://github.com/netdna/...
7
Large sites move their static content (images, JS & CSS files) to a Content Delivery Network or CDN as deploying your content across multiple, geographically dispersed servers will make your pages load faster from the user's perspective.
As the CDN has a different domain name, it also provides domain sharding benefits.
7
The intelligence of the blocker is down to whatever extension or software the user is using. Some will simply block adsense, while others may be configured to read a white list, or black list configuration.
Typically a site with its own ad-network shouldn't be a problem unless the site is used by hundreds of thousands of people, then you may have people ...
7
There's another aspect that should be mentioned here:
Freemium is a pricing strategy by which a product or service (typically a digital offering or application such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods.
It's a common approach to get ...
7
Sources say that Facebook/Externalhit does not respect crawl-delay in robots.txt because Facebook doesn't use a crawler, it uses a scraper.
Whenever one of your pages is shared on Facebook, it scrapes your site for your meta title, description and image.
My guess is that if Facebook is scraping your site 11,000 times in 15 minutes then I think the most ...
6
This wasn't possible when you asked the question. This is now possible with PageRules.
Note: You want to exclude the admin section of your site with a PageRule as well. If you do cache everything and the admin section is included, you will likely see some sort of looping error.
6
Yes, Amazon Cloudfront can now serve GZip'ed / HTML Compressed content to end users fairly easily. This used to be rather hard, but Amazon added this to Cloudfront around November 2010.
What you are looking for is called "custom origin". The gist of it is:
You set up your own web server, and configure this server to correctly compress content for ...
6
It certainly used to be possible, indeed Stack Exchange themselves use Imgur for hosting all user uploaded images:
New Image Upload Support
And some more recent comments on why they are still using Imgur over Amazon S3.
Note though that you will need a Pro account with them to ensure that your images persist.
However, this isn't really a CDN in the ...
6
will browsers recognize individual files as being the same as pre-cached ones, if they are served from different subdomains?
No. Two identical files served from different locations are different files as far as the browser (cache) is concerned.
The URL is the key by which the file is cached by the browser.
As media1, media2 etc all serve the same files, ...
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