We left Cloudflare today…….justifiably so!
I had an earlier post about our decision to move to Cloudflare. I have to report that the decision was simply not a good one! Initially, we were sold on the promised performance, edge capabilities, security (think https, SSL etc) and more importantly the scalability. It took about a week of tweak after tweak, dropping SSL certs all over the place, multiple support tickets, a few calls, dip in site performance, a jacked up payment process that completely disrupted our Payment processing (we use PayPal as our payment partner……found they definitely don’t play well with Cloudflare. If you want to keep the integrity of your payment processing with PayPal, I advise you leverage their existing Global Enterprise infrastructure that’s already fully secure….tighter than the East Berlin Wall during the cold war. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel with Cloudflare.
Additionally, coupled with no difference in performance, Cloudflare was presenting old data even after updates. When we updated our site and refreshed at Cloudflare….even after 2 days they were still presenting the old information. This does not sit well given when updates happen they should be propagated immediately. We dropped SSL into our environment and anything outside of their SSL they didn’t pick up, raster, propagate, or update anything. Furthermore on the Payment gateway issues, they simply weren’t allowing any processing through…..both on the sandbox and in the live environment….this was the last straw.
Our images were no exception either, we may move to S3 soon just for improved performance, our existing Cloud partner might work with us on that…we may update n-ginx or Tomcat first for some preliminary results. All in all, there’s really been no value add to Cloudflare so far. So the Cloudflare experiment while worth the exercise simply isn’t worth it for us. Maybe at a future date, but the value proposition simply isn’t there at this point.