Though this is super-relevant because during the struggle with Cloudflare, we released an article about LOIC and how easy it is to reveal the locations and identities of individuals involved in a DDoS attack using LOIC.
http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/03/low-orbit-ion-cannon-exp...
LOIC and a number of the more public DDoS tools make the attackers' identities relatively easy to track. The big attack we saw last Saturday is much more difficult to trace both because it is originated with a UDP request (the headers of which can be forged) and because it is reflected off open resolvers (essentially laundering the identity of the attack's source).
The real reason that we stopped using Cloudflare is that when you were unable to serve the cached page, it throws up a Cloudflare branded page. We thought that those sorts of error pages would diminish our image as an open source publication because it seems to suggest that we can't rely on our own tools and abilities.
If we were able to display a "Powerbase" branded 404 type page, we would have been more satisfied.
I unfortunately use PayPal and their Instant Notification thing, basically a callback to a web page with a POST about the transaction that just happened. Upon receiving the POST I can then do things like notify the customer, dispatch goods, award virtual goods, etc.
The problem I had was that after putting my website (in the London Linode datacenter) behind CloudFlare, PayPal started randomly failing to reach the callback page.
PayPal, being PayPal, failed silently for a few days before finally sending an email to say that they couldn't notify me of transactions. I figured it out just before that though, because users were getting the CloudFlare "site offline" message.
The pages on my site are 100% dynamic, so nothing was cached by the feature that keeps a site online.
My biggest problem with CloudFlare was visibility for debugging: I had no visibility.
If it wasn't for my users letting me know and PayPal emailing me confirming what I thought... I wouldn't have known. Even then it took too long to find out, over a week from when it started to fail silently.
According to Linode there was no downtime in that period, and according to my server logs load was never above average and there was no reason it should've been unable to be reached.
Did I submit a ticket? I submitted some questions beforehand and got back answers that were very friendly but not technically detailed. That's also how I found the interface, I couldn't debug using CloudFlare, no way to answer the questions "What is happening? Why is it happening?". So no, when I figured it out I wasn't going to stay with CloudFlare as even if it was resolved I would still lack visibility for future problem-solving.
In the end it was costing me goodwill with my users.
I wanted things you didn't provide:
How often did CloudFlare fail to contact my network?
Can I see a chart of such failures over time?
What were the failure error codes and times so that I can cross-reference them to my logs?
Basically: I wanted transparency so I could have confidence in the service, and detail so that I can debug failures when they occur.
And I was going to email this as it's really a "just to let you know". But you have no email in your HN profile, and looking through the support emails I had I see tenderapp.com and can't make a guess what your email address may be, and I pinged you on Twitter but no response and it's very late here... so posting it so you can see.
If you add ways for developers to debug issues when using CloudFlare then I may well be tempted back in the future. The fundamental premise is a good one and I really wanted it to work (paid for the Enterprise level, had every intention of using it). But when failing silently costs real money and customer goodwill, I don't feel I had a choice but to U-turn very rapidly.
As soon as I was off CloudFlare, PayPal Instant Payment Notification worked again and there hasn't been a single failure since.
Support was fairly unhelpful, basically just saying "sometimes this happens, and it usually clears up".
Or are you suggesting bypassing CloudFlare for all dynamic content? In which case, why use them?
I actually did use them just for a CDN for a few more days. I use a second domain (sslcache.se) to proxy inline images in user generated content that doesn't originate from an SSL site but the user is viewing my site over SSL. Similar to this https://github.com/atmos/camo , except mine isn't written in node.js
Even then, users complained of broken images when they were logged in (on SSL).
The very basic thing: CloudFlare fails silently, sometimes. Well, that still happened with very basic content. From CloudFlares perspective the sslcache.se service was a site of static files, as I prime the content (download in the background) when a user submits the content. By the time the request for an item goes to CloudFlare the image is already being served from a local file system.
CDN only, it still errored enough that the end user noticed. And still without any information for me to resolve it.
If CDN is your only purpose? this mostly only useful for static files like JS, CSS and HTML. Somehow your answer is not clear what you try to accomplish. Too little information to go by. If you experience issues with their service, bother them more to get it resolved. Any gain you have improves the service for others.
In the worst case you can always look at other services. I am not sure but I believe Amazon CloudFront provides a similar solution.
I'd also love to see the option of periodic uploads of raw traffic logs to an S3 bucket or similar. Something akin to how AWS CloudFront handles raw logs. I believe raw logs are currently available on their enterprise packages, but this seems like basic functionality (that would provide much of the needed transparency) and should be included in all of the paid plans.
Yes, Dreamhost sucks. So does Hostgator. So does every other oversold host.