Do shop owners add their sites to Cloudflair

[14Steve14]

I have been advised by my hosts to add my site to Cloadfair to help reduce the number of bots that are visiting our site and causing low resource errors.

We have added 8G firewalls and also blocked IPs in the htaccess file, but the IP range they use is huge and we are still seeing visits from the blocked IPs, hence the contact with my hosts support. I contacted my hosts, Krystal, for advice and was told 'If you continue to see an influx of resource usage due to bots, you could try routing the domain through Cloudflare. They have automated tools to help block this type of traffic automatically.'

Does the free version of Cloudflair affect end user use or cause end users any problems?

[BatteryTrader]

Hi I have been using Cloudflare for about a year

For my main shopping site, I have it on the pro version, but I have other sites on the free version.

I certainly do not think it's overly easy to use, but I would not be without it now for so many reasons. It certainly takes the pressure off with the bad bots out there, but you cannot just switch it on; you still have to get involved.

Think the firewall is good to use, also like the cache, but a bit annoying that even things you want to use cost extra, but that's life.

Another handy thing is the logging, again an extra, but makes it easier for my to find issues with pages by being able to drill down, perhaps if i spent more time on my server I could do most of this, but to busy trying to put a meal on the table.

For me, it's far from perfect, but I would not be without it. would love to be able to justify the enterprise version, but can't.

Regards

[frankl]

I use Cloudflare. Once set up it is brilliant but setting it up requires more than flicking a few switches.

The issues you are having are probably coming from a scraper using Bright Data, who offer millions of rotating residential IPs for scrapers and bad bots.

[14Steve14]

Hi @BatteryTrader @frankl
Does adding it affect the way customers use the site. I often see something when I first open a site about checking you are human. Does this put off customers in anyway, or is that only showing because its not set up properly.

[BatteryTrader]

No, that's only if you have it switched on because you think you are being attacked, full protection, you would not want it switched on unless you have an issue like that.

[martindavinci]

I switched to Cloudflare because I’d had more than enough of the attacks coming from certain countries. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any issues.
I’ve been happy with it so far, though it can be a bit of a faff at times because Cloudflare has a caching system that needs to be cleared whenever I make changes to the shop, such as updating images. (in the cache configuration)

[BatteryTrader]

best thing is to open a free account, put a old domain on it that you are not bothered about and work out how to set it all up,

All you are really doing is changing your name servers to those of cloudflare, so then all the traffic goes through them before it reaches your server.

then play.

[BatteryTrader]

I switched to Cloudflare because I’d had more than enough of the attacks coming from certain countries. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any issues.
I’ve been happy with it so far, though it can be a bit of a faff at times because Cloudflare has a caching system that needs to be cleared whenever I make changes to the shop, such as updating images. (in the cache configuration)

You can search the cache for specific files and just clear those rather than full clear.

also if its set up right, it gets the cache's time from your records (in htaccess)

[burt]

From the user perspective, some sites (using Cloudflare) I visit give me a "are you human" captcha style tickbox, which can become repetitive. But I do browse differently to most, so I expect once done "one time" it might remember - it doesn;t remember for me as I do not allow it to.

[14Steve14]

We asked a question to our newsletter readers last weekend about their thoughts on sites that use Cloudflare, especially when they see the 'not a robot' checkbox, and many said they just close the window and find another website.

I did expect something like that as I often do the same when on a site and the checkbox keeps appearing. What I didn't expect was that so many do this, which would obviously loose business, so for now it looks like I need an alternative, which is back to blocking IPs.