My blog was constantly going down for unknown reasons, with nothing obvious in the logs. I migrated it to CloudFlare and was able to track down the root-cause of the issue.
I also blocked all the AI crawlers after moving to CloudFlare and have stopped a huge amount of traffic theft with it.
My website is definitely much more stable, and loads insanely faster, since moving to CloudFlare.
I don't give a penny to CloudFlare to be clear, and I would definitely not pay for those services for my blog.
It's not because it's not a criticism that it's a sponsored post.
I happen to have multiple sites that use the same technology (WordPress, with the same few plugins and the same theme) running on the same server, with one behind CloudFlare and one not. Left value is with CloudFlare, right is without:
- First Contentful Paint: 0.4s - 0.7s
- Largest Contentful Paint: 0.8s - 0.9s
- Total Blocking Time: 0 ms - 0 ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0 - 0
- Speed Index: 0.4s - 8.9s
The difference is quite staggering, and I'm located pretty close to my server (a Hetzner VPS), I can't imagine the difference for someone that lives across the world.
> Sure, but your post reads like an infomercial, hence the snark.
Re-reading it you're right, but ultimately the last sentence aims at directly answering this question from the parent:
> If you added up all the outage time caused by DDOS and all the outage time caused by being behind auxiliary services that have their own outages... I wonder which would be larger?
There's no CF magic here. If you're improving from 0.4s to 8.9s that means you're not doing basic caching on your side and you could achieve this in your local nginx/whatever as well. The 0.3s saving on first paint is nice, but could be achieved with putting your assets in any kind of distributed provider, not just CF.
I never said the contrary, but there's a lot of "basic" things you need to setup on your own and that CloudFlare (or any equivalent) does out of the box: caching, SSL certificate, basic analytics, filtering bots, etc.
Add all this together and you have an extremely not basic setup at all anymore.
I'm quite sure something else is going on here. Adding another hop generally shouldn't improve performance, especially if you are close by to the server.
What are the response times of requests between CF and accessing them directly?
The tides are turning against CF it seems.. they used to have a lot of HN support, but lately every thread about them is just a mess of MITM accusations and "too much of the internet is behind them".
I also blocked all the AI crawlers after moving to CloudFlare and have stopped a huge amount of traffic theft with it.
My website is definitely much more stable, and loads insanely faster, since moving to CloudFlare.