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What is CloudFlare?

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.
CloudFlare is a tool in the Content Delivery Network category of a tech stack.

Who uses CloudFlare?

Companies
50244 companies reportedly use CloudFlare in their tech stacks, including Udemy, Lyft, and Tinder.

Developers
25380 developers on StackShare have stated that they use CloudFlare.

CloudFlare Integrations

Google Analytics, Terraform, Pingdom, Acquia, and Plesk are some of the popular tools that integrate with CloudFlare. Here's a list of all 66 tools that integrate with CloudFlare.
Pros of CloudFlare
424
Easy setup, great cdn
277
Free ssl
199
Easy setup
190
Security
180
Ssl
98
Great cdn
77
Optimizer
71
Simple
44
Great UI
28
Great js cdn
12
Apps
12
HTTP/2 Support
12
DNS Analytics
12
AutoMinify
9
Rocket Loader
9
Ipv6
9
Easy
8
IPv6 "One Click"
8
Fantastic CDN service
7
DNSSEC
7
Nice DNS
7
SSHFP
7
Free GeoIP
7
Amazing performance
7
API
7
Cheapest SSL
6
SPDY
6
Free and reliable, Faster then anyone else
5
Ubuntu
5
Asynchronous resource loading
4
Global Load Balancing
4
Performance
4
Easy Use
3
CDN
2
Registrar
2
Support for SSHFP records
1
Web3
1
Прохси
1
HTTPS3/Quic
Decisions about CloudFlare

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose CloudFlare in their tech stack.

Mountain/ \Ash
Shared insights
at

In mid-2018 we made a big push for speed on the site. The site, running on PHP, was taking about 7 seconds to load. The site had already been running through CloudFlare for some time but on a shared host in Sydney (which is also where most of the customers are). We found when developing the @TuffTruck site that DigitalOcean was fast - and even though it's located overseas, we still found it 2 seconds faster for Australian users. We found that some Wordpress plugins were really slowing the TTFB - with all plugins off, Wordpress would save respond 1.5-2 seconds faster. With a on/off step through of each plugin we found 2 plugins by Ontraport (a CRM type service that some forms we populating) was the main culprit. Out it went and we built our own WP plugin to do push the data to Ontraport only when required. With the TTFB acceptable, we moved on to getting the completed page load time down. Turning on CloudFlare 's HTML/CSS/JS minifications & Rocket Loader we could get our group of test pages, including the homepage, loading [in full] in just over 2 seconds. We then moved images off to imgix and put the CSS, JS and Fonts onto a mirrored subdomain (so that cookies weren't exchanged), but this only shaved about another 0.2 seconds off. We are keeping it running for the moment, but the $10 minimum a month for imgix is hardly worth it (this would be change if new images were going up all the time and needed processing). The client is overly happy with the ~70% improvement and has already seen the site move up the ranks of Google's SERP and bring down their PPC costs. AND all the new hosting providers still come in at half the price of the previous Sydney hosting service. We have a few ideas that we are testing on our staging site and will roll these out soon.

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Eugene Cheah

For inboxkitten.com, an opensource disposable email service;

We migrated our serverless workload from Cloud Functions for Firebase to CloudFlare workers, taking advantage of the lower cost and faster-performing edge computing of Cloudflare network. Made possible due to our extremely low CPU and RAM overhead of our serverless functions.

If I were to summarize the limitation of Cloudflare (as oppose to firebase/gcp functions), it would be ...

  1. <5ms CPU time limit
  2. Incompatible with express.js
  3. one script limitation per domain

Limitations our workload is able to conform with (YMMV)

For hosting of static files, we migrated from Firebase to CommonsHost

More details on the trade-off in between both serverless providers is in the article

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Ken Kondo
Senior Product Manager at Lumin Digital · | 4 upvotes · 199.8K views
Needs advice
on
CloudFlareCloudFlare
and
Google reCaptchaGoogle reCaptcha

We are building an Online Account Opening Application, and we already have CloudFlare. They are asking us to add Google reCaptcha, but I think that Cloudfare should be configured for this application, and we don't need Recaptcha too.

What are your thoughts?

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Needs advice
on
Amazon S3Amazon S3
and
CloudFlareCloudFlare

Amazon S3 or CloudFlare as a CDN? Anyone like one over the other? My devs are switching to Amazon S3 but I would like other opinions - thank you in advance! Read a little how they differ, but would love an expert opinion. Thanks!

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Kim Boothman
Director Digital Engineering at Emerson Electric Co. · | 3 upvotes · 181.5K views
Needs advice
on
CloudFlareCloudFlare
and
EdgeCastEdgeCast

Currently using EdgeCast CDN/WAF and considering a migration to CloudFlare.

See more

Blog Posts

GitHubSlackNGINX+15
28
21036
Jun 19 2015 at 6:37AM

ReadMe.io

JavaScriptGitHubNode.js+25
12
2416

CloudFlare's Features

  • CDN
  • WAF (Web Application Firewall)
  • DDOS Protection

CloudFlare Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to CloudFlare?
Akamai
If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward.
MaxCDN
The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.
Incapsula
Through an application-aware, global content delivery network (CDN), Incapsula provides any website and web application with best-of-breed security, DDoS protection, load balancing and failover solutions.
Netlify
Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment.
Fastly
Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.
See all alternatives

CloudFlare's Followers
22327 developers follow CloudFlare to keep up with related blogs and decisions.