Cloudflare is a Feature-Rich Solution for Handling Requests and Serving Content on the Web!
August 27, 2023
Cloudflare is a Feature-Rich Solution for Handling Requests and Serving Content on the Web!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cloudflare
We use Cloudflare DNS to manage many sites with page rules for redirects, caching static content before it reaches our backend, Bot/DDoS mitigation, web analytics, and most recently as a proxy for our web app's API. Analytics are non-intrusive and tend not to be blocked by clients whereas Google Analytics are mostly blocked by our audience. We are exploring Pages and Workers for deploying a web app created in SvelteKit.
- DNS is quick to set up and seems to propagate quicker than other DNS name servers. Page rules are very convenient for quickly setting up redirects with wildcards.
- Setting up a proxy with Cloudflare Workers for my API, which runs on Google Cloud Functions was much simpler than any solution I came across using Google Cloud Platform itself. It also doesn't cost us a lot of money for this use case.
- Web Analytics are privacy-focused, so it is nice to get insights into our application without worrying about the data being sold. The interface is very clean. I like being able to query page views by bot score, to see how many bots are viewing pages compared to actual users. Querying this data is also very quick and simple when compared to Google Analytics API.
- I wish Analytics had a larger window to query for historical data. At the moment we have to store the data in our own database to retain historical records. I also wish the web UI had the ability to filter on "likely human" traffic, at the moment, I need to use the GraphQL API to include this filter.
- I would like to see a performant way to do "rewrites" where traffic from another domain we operate is served up without changing the URL. To be fair, part of the problem with this is related to how the pages are served.
- Managing users is a little awkward. You invite users to manage your account via email like the copy on the site says "Invite Members to join user@domain.com's account. Invite Members to access your account and edit configurations." which is confusing because it seems like people are using my email to log in. However, this is just the wording they chose, it does work as expected. Once you get passed that, the access controls are fine-grained and intuitive.
- I wish I could set up a cache based on the body of the request, to use an ID within the payload as a key to cache each type of request.
- A lot of requests are cached and so egress costs from downstream providers are mitigated.
- DDoS protection has also managed to keep our site up and our cloud computing bill down.
- Setting up a proxy with a worker made putting various Google Cloud Functions running behind a single URL very easy and performant. Plus they offer API Shield on top of this.
I just tried using their basic DNS, but it was surprisingly flaky. Sometimes pages just wouldn't load due to timeouts. Once I moved my name servers over that problem went away. Google Domains and GoDaddy just don't offer all the other things you would want to do with your site after DNS is set up. Cloudflare has so many tools to help your site load fast and secure. With very competitive prices on top of that.
It was straightforward to set up and their email support and forums are also good for solving issues. I never ran into any issues I was completely stumped on.
Do you think Cloudflare delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Cloudflare's feature set?
Yes
Did Cloudflare live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Cloudflare go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cloudflare again?
Yes