Cloudflare?

[Moonchild]

I was wondering if any of you people have had experience with Cloudflare?

They offer a free service to website owners which would make my sites faster as well as saving bandwidth to the actual server behind the cloud...
Using a CDN is always good, especially if it's intelligent - but before I spend time on it: has any of you has personal experience with them and their service?

[tribaljet]

Cloudflare is, IMHO, mainly useful for keeping cached content online and does provide an additional layer of security. Can't say it has improved site performance, though.

[Moonchild]

I've decided to go with it, since it's actually rather non-invasive on the webdesign front. I looked into how exactly the system works, and it's in fact similar to what I planned to implement anyway with nginx, saving me the trouble - they reverse-proxy content through their network, which by definition would make things faster, at least for static content. For dynamic content, it adds a little latency but since their servers will be local, that's probably going to be i the order of 30 ms - not something I'm worried about.

As it's DNS-based, it will take some time to propagate but should otherwise be completely transparent.

(and no, the forum downtime today was not related to this, that was webhostingpad yet again with "unscheduled downtime" for an hour on their "99.9% uptime" servers... to add to the 3 or so a little while back, and the regular bouts of 10-15 minutes I've seen - the analytics I get through cloudflare should also allow me to record exactly when and how often this happens, though.. more bonus)

So, fingers crossed it pans out.