Please share CloudFlare experience

[watkinsheating]

I'm a little nervous about moving to CloudFlare. I'd love to hear everyone's experience with CloudFlare or other CDNs.

PS My site is static and non SSL.

[AlanMosley]

I use Azure, Microsoft's cloud.

Its quite simple to use and quite cheap with a 3 month free trial. If you are a Microsoft Partner you get a lot for free and cheaper rates on the rest

[JohnW-UK]

I've also been looking into Cloudflare for a security plan. Also interested to here peoples experiences and if there is any SEO issues with using it.

[watkinsheating]

Update.

We installed cloudflare 10 days ago. Doesn't seem to be affecting our rankings. Seomoz's thursday update showsa slight improvment in most of my keywords this week. Probably unrelated. Our site is monstrously faster. Cloudflare also claims to have blocked 4% of my traffic as a known threat (likely spammers). From my short experience and the recommendation of my developer, I would have to give it a thumbs up.

[AlanMosley]

Page sppeed will only have a afect on rankings if your page is really slow. Matt cutts said it affects less than 1% iof pages

so going from a average speed to a fast speed will have no affect.

[JohnW-UK]

How are you getting on? Still happy? What are the analytics like? Giving you anything you can't get from Google Analytics?

[watkinsheating]

Very pleased so far, though I have no experience with any other CDN. GA reporting was not altered at all. It is interesting to see that cloudflare is reporting nearly twice as many visitors as GA. I guess there's a lot of folks blocking java script. It has cut requests and bandwidth to my server in half and blocked quite a few spammers and botnet zombies. I would certainly recommend.

[watkinsheating]

I don't think I answered your analytics question very well. Cloudflare is really not giving any useful stats. Just a graph of hits, crawlers, threats, and unique visitors. I still use ga for keyword and content data.

[JohnW-UK]

Thanks. I am looking into putting Piwik on my server to have another source so I can compare with GA.

[webbroi]

I'm going to add it to a really BIG site we are working on.  I will keep you all posted.