[_eht]

I typically find myself off set with every new Cloudflare offering, followed by wondering if they are reaching for a niche outside of DDOS protection.

I'm not in a position to explore a need for Cloudflare outside of hiding my origin IP addresses, but for those of you who are, are you actually using and benefiting from the wide array of offerings from Cloudflare? As it stands now, I see these announcements and make a mental note to expect a slough of marketing emails in my inbox for the next couple weeks.

[manigandham]

Yes, they have plenty of customers benefiting and are one of the few companies that are constantly innovating with new features, especially with content delivery performance and security. As much as I dislike network consolidation into a handful of companies, there are not many real competitors for the features and value of Cloudflare.

[_eht]

I thought I made it clear that I realized that when I asked for other people's opinions.

[snaky]

Speaking about consolidation, sometimes it looks like AOLv2 (or MSNv2) is coming, with Cloudflare on transport layer, Google on WWW layer on top of it, and Facebook on social layer on top of it.

[_eht]

Nice edit. Were the downvotes getting to you?

[manigandham]

Nope.

[eugeneionesco]

I basically use Cloudflare for dns management, they make it so easy....

[thinkMOAR]

I use a ton of registrars, almost all have equal simple dns management as CF. Which requires a party less to use or leak traffic information to.

[_eht]

What is the turnaround time for DNS to propogate on all of those registrars? Are you forced into waiting for TTL's to expire?

I may be wrong but I think eugeneionesco is referencing instant DNS changes which come as a benefit of using Cloudflare and other large DNS management companies. I've never personally seen a registrar offer anything like that.

[eugeneionesco]

Almost instant DNS change is something that I kinda take for granted. Surprising that's so rare...

[mugsie]

well ... the protocol was designed not do that.

DNS is "just" a globally distributed, eventually consistent, key:value store, with a ton of caching built into it.

Also, while it may look instant to you, it may not be to your customers / users / other internet people.

[JakeTheAndroid]

While DNS caches can sometimes impact DNS updates, we rebuild the entire zone file when a DNS value is updated, and purge the previous cache. Even for customers, this should happen pretty quickly. We maintain a 5 minute TTL on all proxied records internally. So, this happens much faster than most other DNS services.

[always_good]

It's instant because CloudFlare isn't changing DNS records, just where its pointers point to.

Look at it / try it.

[rasz]

are you one of those people running DNS with TTL measured in tens to hundreds of seconds?

[eugeneionesco]

You don't leak any traffic information if you don't enable the proxy, which I don't.

I like the simple easy to use interface and the fact that all the domains that I manage are there, no need to login to multiple registrars.

[OliverJones]

I believe DDOS-repelling service is an intended consequence of their global CDN, not its purpose. Its purpose is speeding things up for users.