Tjoene Posted June 10, 2011 Posted June 10, 2011 I came across this site called www.cloudflare.com. It is a free service, and NOT a hosting provider. This service speeds up your site, protect it, put less load on the actual server and keeps the server online, even when the server is down. (here is a good review of how it works: http://techgeeks-online.com/2010/cloudflare-review/ ) When I googled for it, I only found good reviews of it. (e.g. http://developdaly.com/web-design/cloudfla...bounce-rate-94/ ) It seems you can also integrate it in cPanel: https://www.cloudflare.com/wiki/Cpanel I don't know if this actual works, but if it does, it would be great to have it here. Maybe you could use to keep the server load down. Or isn't this possible to use it here?
jje Posted June 10, 2011 Posted June 10, 2011 This support request is being escalated to our root admin.
Guest Geoff Posted June 10, 2011 Posted June 10, 2011 This actually sounds like a good idea for HelioHost and HelioNet. Might integrate it into cpanel also.
Tjoene Posted June 11, 2011 Author Posted June 11, 2011 And the best part of the whole story is that is it free. Also, you will have stats for your site. Although only every 24h a refresh, but you have them.
jje Posted June 11, 2011 Posted June 11, 2011 It provides stats? Uh-oh... We disabled auto statistics as it was putting pressure on server. This may be the same, as the stats will have to update for 1500 accounts every 24 hours.
Guest Geoff Posted June 11, 2011 Posted June 11, 2011 @jje I don't think you understand what he is recommending. He is only recommending we enable this for HelioHost.org and HelioNet.org, not people's websites.
Tjoene Posted June 11, 2011 Author Posted June 11, 2011 I had hoped you could enable it for every one. But you should certainly enable it for heliohost en helionet! How ever, it could be useful for stevie and johnny. If you install it on cPanel, people will see an icon in cPanel. That will lead to a page where you can choose to enable cloud flare. If people want to use it, the app will do all the changes that need to happen automatically. You only need to supply an email address, and cloud flare will send a password so you can log in. And about the stats, it they DON'T take place on the helio servers as far as I know, but on the cloud flare servers. So they don't stress the helio servers, but you can view them in cPanel. Every 24h the stats are refreshed, since you use the free service. If you pay they will be refreshed every 15 min. You can also change all the settings using cPanel.
Krydos Posted June 11, 2011 Posted June 11, 2011 It provides stats? Uh-oh... We disabled auto statistics as it was putting pressure on server. This may be the same, as the stats will have to update for 1500 accounts every 24 hours. I haven't read any of the external links or anything, but I think the point of the stats are if you use CloudFlare your server stats won't be accurate anymore because not every single access to your site is going to send it's request to your server anymore. Since the load is distributed between multiple servers with a cached copy of your site your personal server would only register stats for the 40% or whatever of requests that end up going to it. That is why CloudFlare offers stats so you can monitor how many people view the site total (summed up from all the requests to all the different cached copies, etc.)
Ashoat Posted June 12, 2011 Posted June 12, 2011 What exactly does this service provide? DNS anycast, a CDN, and prefetching of some sort? I need the technical details.
Piotr GRD Posted June 12, 2011 Posted June 12, 2011 CloudFlare is not that great for dynamic pages in my opinion. It works in the way that you are pointing your domains/subdomains to their servers with the proper CNAME records. The visitors are sending requests for your pages to their (multiple) servers. Then their servers are requesting the page from original source and send it to the visitor. In other words - it works as a reverse proxy. While it works fine for static pages as these may be cached on their servers, save the bandwidth of your original server and even if it is down the page will be displayed to the client from the copy, but it's not that great for dynamic pages, as the "proxy" server needs to access the original server everytime, anyway. I did see the pages that use CloudFlare already and in a case of original server problems for dynamic pages I've only see a CloudFlare message about problem after many seconds of waiting time instead of request timing out like it is normally. Some other hosting recently did turn it ON and integrate in cPanel for all the clients, I don't know if it works as espected for them. Dynamic pages that uses it are not faster if the original server is slow, at least that's my personal experience. Other people may have different opinion, definitelly it have to have some advantages if so many people are using it already.
cl58 Posted June 12, 2011 Posted June 12, 2011 I don't know how well this actually works, but I just saw http://support.cloudflare.com/kb/top-frequ...with-cloudflare That may be worth reading.
rvt Posted June 12, 2011 Posted June 12, 2011 I agree with Piotr, it is possible to cache content that is always changing like on a forum so I don't think it is worth it for Helionot. Setting it up for HelioHost, however, might not be a terrible idea.
Guest Geoff Posted June 12, 2011 Posted June 12, 2011 We can't force users to use cloudflare. We could try to convince them to use cloudflare and set it up automatically, but forcing it on them would reduce our rating/ degrade quality of web hosting.
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