Moved to Cloudflare...

I read this article on a blog I read. Gonna move to Cloudflare. More details later.

I read a post on a website that I read up on every few days. The post mentioned that the site got a lot of traffic in one day and that using Cloudflare has helped him not use up his entire server bandwidth.

I moved my domain to Cloudflare and I think I’m seeing improvements in terms of load times and responses. I used a droplet that I have access to make hundreds of requests to my websites to get the caching up and running. It works? Maybe.

I’ll only know more in the morning when all the overnight requests finish. And not to mention, I’ll be having the request script run indefinitely tonight. So I’m bound to cache something.

I'm writing this after a few months I actually moved to Cloudflare. Its actually working out great. I'm getting great metrics in terms of where from the world all the requests are coming from. Most of them are from the US, which means it is Google's crawlers. I'm getting a ton of traffic from South-East Asia too...

I ran into a lot of issues with SSL just breaking whenever I set up a new subdomain and install SSL certs on my server. It turns out, there is a SSL setting that I needed to change. It's under the "Crypto" tab. It's default value is "Flexible". Had to change it to "Full (Strict)".

I personally found out about this setting when I was troubleshooting something for work. We were trying to deploy an app that has multiple subdomains as it's endpoints. We were failing the SSL cert generation every time until we set it up as "Full (Strict)".

I'm also using the Cloudflare API to control my DNS records now. Since I have one web service hosted from home, which has a dynamic IP address, I needed a quick and easier way to update the DNS record rather than have to go to the console to change it. I made a python script to help speed up the process. It's set up as a cron job on my computer and it hasn't failed me yet.

Cloudflare has been nice to me. Its been working great.