I noticed some discussion on Boonex's Facebook Page about CloudFlare. Has anyone used it and noticed marked differences in security threats along with load-times and general web-handling? We've signed up and will see how it goes. At the moment after running with them for an hour or two, page-load time has reduced by around 55%! I will continue to monitor this and report back. Other existing user opinions very much appreciated.

I am very interested to hear of any update with you using CloudFlare. Has web-handling stayed steady? How much traffic does your site get on average montly and users within the database overall? I am thinking about trying Boonex for a site idea, but got kind of worried as people complained about slowness.  Thats until I heard of trying to use CloudFlare or other CDN.

CloudFlare is a good 'add-on' for any site in general really, not least for its attack stopping benefits as well as all the others listed on their website. You need to run a dedicated server, or VPS, fully tuned using Boonex's recommendations. Then you have a much greater chance of having a site that runs optimally with many users. Our site is a large community with many concurrent users, it holds up well.

We use cloudflare and it has saved us a lot of bandwidth and I prefer the ip blocker it has compared to the boonex. The block is almost instant. 

Recently discovered this thread. This what really did the trick for us in terms of speeding dolphin up.  

http://www.boonex.com/forums/?action=goto&my_threads=1#topic/Need-for-Speed-.htm 

We blocked China with one simple click using CloudFlare... highly recommend that along with the bandwidth savings as mentioned.

 yup.

I just asked Host4Web to install LiteSpeed for me. I might look into Cloudflare also.

I am new to all this and learning.

Ok, Thanks for the review. I really like Dolphin in terms of customization . I was just a little worried how it would hold up if my site grew to the idea I hoped. I would hope for membership around 5,000+ members or so as I am catering to a locazlized metropolitan communtiy, which could equate to possible 50,000+ hits per month.

That said, I was looking at all avenues to optimally make sure everything ran smooth. I was looking at a VPS through Hostgator running Linux. I think the exact plan had about 1.8GHZ and 1.2GB Ram.

If you think those specs would suffice, chime in if you don't mind. Thanks again :)

I'm using Cloudflare for a while now and I notice speed improvement. That's a major benefit, isn't it ?

So I would recommend it.

 you would be hard pressed to run a dolphin community of 5000 members with 1.8Ghz and less than 2GB ram.

JoeWa - this looks promising, thanks for posting & I would be interested to hear if it has still been working out well?

I'm concerned with how they keep the "free" version, well, free. Seems to me there has to be some benefit or people wouldn't use it, but they have to make up for it somewhere. My concern is with the possibility of them data mining (even if it is anonymous) or injecting delivered/ad content to your users....

Just signed up a free account to test 1 of my sites on. 

Its a new site launch so not the best for making a comparison!

Still, should at least be able to check the anti spam...

I installed CloudFlare as well. Had a couple problems at the beginning in getting setup but they ironed everything out quickly. Its running well and imho the stats are better than google. You also have different security levels that you can apply. The site is loading quicker and we are getting better traffic.

I also use akismet for spam posting.

Best way to check site loading speeds?

http://gtmetrix.com

I tried Cloudflare too and it looks to be working. The only disadvantage i see is that all visitors have the same IP address so the logs are only good if you need find out problems.Currently i have 2 questions open which stop letting me switch to their service.

1) In case of a security breach i wonder how to get the attackers IP then? Does Cloudflare provide the original logs so i can do crosscheck them with my logs?

2) If all visitors have the same IP how can parts of dolphin work that check IP's against IP's in code? Isn't star rating system or shoutbox not based on this? I think i saw lots places that are IP based. What about chat or videochat? I really don't know which is using what to decide i can switch or not.

Maybe dolphin can give me a suggestion?

 You find the IP's of "Attackers" via your dashboard in CloudFlare

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWUSRqZmhAw

How to you setup RMS when using this? I added an "rms" subdomain that is not included in the CloudFlare... but RMS apps still just hang....

Do I need to put in the IP's that CloudFlare changes for my domain?

 If your talking about the 7.1, the chat is not working because I tried to register (In the Flash Apps Panel) it after install and it stopped working.

But, I use a server here at home for RMS on all my websites..not on my VPS

No I'm talking about my site... in  general... can't seem to get the flash apps/rms working with it... even when I changed the rms address to a subdomain...

 for testing I will add your domain to my RMS now, give me five minutes. Could you PM or post your URL

I will PM the IP and ports..

You will get a not connected notice, click ok and test. I have about five other Boonex members who use it as well as I so I know it works..

 not sure you can do that... did you edit all the configuration files in your RMS web-apps

seems to be working ok now... not sure what was up... 

Still trying to gauge how much of an improvement or not the service is...

1,605,358 requests saved by CloudFlare

11.4 GB bandwidth saved by CloudFlare

seems decent for a few days of implementation...

Same thing I'm seeing...

request and bandwidth savings and spamming is down.

Are these results showing from the FREE or the paid version of cloudflare? I may try it, but also concerned about RMS.

I tried Cloudflare too but i also had problems getting the flash/rms stuff to work. So i not using cloudflare anymore.

the free version...

 Yeah... I don't really notice the spamming since on my site you need to upgrade to post anything... but my server is reporting an increase of bandwidth usage too... the daily visitors has only slight;y increased...

 I'm using the free version, set to max security.

No problems with flash here, mynewbeetle,net demo is not stopped once. I do have Flash chat installed and not the default chat. Will change that today to test. Of course I use my home RMS server for all my sites.

This is from mynewbeetle.net

do you use the performance settings at all? I've found some issues when using that... so I have no performance setting enabled...

Yes, I do..

Don't know if you all know this, in the settings there is a "pause" cloud flare so you can experiment, and a development mode...

https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-settings?z=YOURDOMAIN.COM#page=overview

The best part.. this is what a spammer or someone without antivirus software..

yeah that's pretty slick.

With performance on and html/js minify... I have trouble with sending letters...as well deanos tools /Site Administraters... doesn't allow me to logon as a user

 being as I am only working with this on the one site, 7.1, waiting on Deano to release the tools updated for it.

Hopefully it will still work, or, put Cloud Flare in Development mode to use his tool.

I'm not sure if anyone else had noticed this with their sites which are going through CloudFlare... but I was skeptical at first... since it didn't really do much that I could see instantly... but after a few days of it building their cache... it looks like it's really helping. Haven't done much else since and from my graphs, you can see the improvement in my server load... gotta say it's much quicker now too.

With the release of 7.1 and the changes to video, now playing through HTML5... directly from your server.... how are you doing that through CloudFlare?

Or I guess, have you done anything to stick within the Usage policy, since they do not allow streaming of video through their network...

 I have no problems with videos using the HTML5 player.

Also, my 7.0.9 RMS server is used on mynewbeetle.net/7.1/ chat and if your a member of the site, it all works perfect.

Hey newton

have you had any problems with cloudflare and 7.1 with local caching enabled (memcache)?

Seems I'm getting some funky template/and JS problems... so I've had to turn off all my boonex caching...

 No, but I use eAccelerator for caching.

mynewbeetle.net is using HL's NeonGreen template and I have full caching turned on.

So if you see any errors there, let me know, it's been on cloudflare for three months now with no complaints.

the only concern about cloudflare is the video more than 50M or 100M you can not upload to the site.  The fix for that is creating a subdomain like video.domainname.com without cloudflare. 

That was my only bad experience with cloudflare and google speed

 true, the only site I use it on it the beetle site, I don't want or allow large videos on that site. If they want to they can just youtube it.. lol

 Do you minify JS/CSS and HTML (performance settings)?

 yes

 that 2nd screen shot is from cloudflare? (I mean cloudflare's performance settings)

 no, gtmetrix.com

 Settings at cloudflare,

thanks.... I'll have to play around with these a little more I think.

your very welcome