Our site started throwing intermittent Cloudflare error pages and the dashboard gave us little to diagnose the cause. Without a paid plan, getting any human support was nearly impossible, and the community forum guesses didn't resolve it. Frustrating when your edge provider is between you and your users.
Hard to diagnose errors, no support on free tier
During a sustained DDoS attempt, Cloudflare absorbed the traffic and our site never went down, which honestly saved our business that week. The security features, fast DNS, and edge network are all top-tier. For performance and protection combined, I haven't found anything better.
Outstanding DDoS protection and performance
Cloudflare's default caching behaviour served stale content on parts of our site that should never have been cached, and customers saw outdated prices. Untangling which rules and page rules were responsible was far more confusing than it should have been. Powerful, but it bit us hard.
Confusing caching defaults served stale content
Cloudflare sits in front of our site and the free tier alone gave us caching, DDoS protection, and SSL with almost no effort. Page load times improved noticeably for our global visitors. Only reason it's four stars is that some of the more advanced rules require a bit of trial and error to get right.
Great free CDN and security
Advanced rules need fiddling
We moved some request handling to Cloudflare Workers and the performance at the edge has been excellent, with very low latency worldwide. The developer platform keeps improving. It's a solid four stars, held back only by occasional gaps in documentation when you stray off the common path.
Fast edge compute, improving platform
Docs lag behind newer features