[tmarman]

CloudFlare also caused huge performance issues on a side project which I didn't notice until recently. I was consistently getting 1.2s+ responses on a couple of pages, and 600ms on a completely static page.

So, not only did CloudFlare not help on the pages that were truly static, it was actually making everything worse across the board. Hitting the same site with my direct.* DNS cut from 1.2s+ to under 500ms.

CopperEgg and others also kept reporting that my site was down or otherwise super slow when on CloudFlare. I'm not sure if this is because of throttling or something else that might have been in place with the CF service, but either way I was often unable to reproduce the "down"/"more than 6s" that CopperEgg kept reporting.

In short, I think CloudFlare's services sound good in theory, but I'm not sure they have figure out all the issues with scaling and performance yet. So, I cut them out... and certainly not going to be paying any time soon.

[parksy]

I've been on the free account for a while now, and when I received a surge of traffic they responded to 460,000 of the 500,000-ish HTTP requests and served 48gb of the 50 that were requested over the course of about 12 hours. My server load sat at 0.01 the whole time and I could not have been happier. The concept is absolutely sound in theory and in practice.

You raise a great point about reliability however. The above example was a personal project so I don't really lose much if there's the odd down-time here and there. I'd love to recommend this for the enterprise-level clients where I work but the idea of a point of failure out of one's direct control is a bit alarming, and I am surprised and disappointed to see them succumb to a DDOS that affects what (I assume?) was their entire network - even paying customers.

I notice even now my homepage is taking seconds to load, when usually it responds instantly. My guess is that they're prioritizing access at this stage due to the DDOS, if it's still ongoing.