As mentioned in a previous post, I started using Cloudflare Content Distribution Network on Feb 3 in the hope of getting improved performance, and to lower the load on my hosting account. I’m calling this a failed experiment.
After a 5-hour partial outage of USWildflowers.com this morning, I changed DNS back over to “normal,” taking traffic directly to the website rather than through Cloudflare.
I had not seen an improvement in performance based on Google Webmaster statistics. I assume that Cloudflare’s statistics were correct in that they were taking a significant part of the load off of the host (HostGator) but when weighing the risk of outage using Cloudflare vs Hostgator getting overloaded, I decided to use the sure-thing of experience (site was down on Cloudflare) vs the “maybe” that Hostgator will sanction me for overuse of their resources.
Sorry this didn’t work out, but thanks for sharing your experience. I’m sure others have thought about trying such things (I might with Amazon’s CloudFront) and all data points/lessons learned help.
This might be on the “you get what you pay for” page. Cloudflare is a free service. I wasn’t aware of Amazon CloudFront; I’ll take a look. Thanks, Adam.