cloudflare

Finally decided to try out cloudflare to see if my site would load faster. I had already created an account ages ago but was hesitant due a a few reasons.

1) Changing DNS will affect my MX records and during transition period, my emails might be lost if settings are wrong.

2) Complicated setup due to dynamic IP, have to create script to update IP and have to create a direct route so I can SSH into server.

So anyway, I decided to try it out just now and the results were quite disappointing. After allowing time for DNS to propagate and caching of my site to occur, I discovered that loading was actually slower on cloudflare. In addition, images even failed to load occasionally. I tried loading from a US IP as well as a UK IP and it took on average twice as long to load. I cleared my browser cache between tests to ensure a fair comparison.I was using the free service so the bandwidth might have been shared with many others.

Anyway I have disabled cloudflare and am now serving from my server.