Cloudflare - Should I be concerned about false positives and bad neighbourhood IP problems

[lcourse]

I am considering using cloudflare for a couple of my sites.
What is your experience?

I researched a bit and there are 3 issues I am concerned about:

1. google may consider site bad neighbourhood in case other sites on same DNS/IP are spammy.
   Any way to prevent this? Anybody had a problem?

2. ddos attack on site on same DNS could affect our sites stability.

3. blocking false positives. Legitimate users may be forced to answer captchas etc. to be able to see the page. 1-2% of legit visitor were reported by other moz member to be identified as false positive. 
   Can I effectively prevent this by reducing cloudflare basic security level?

Also did you experience that cloudflare really helped with uptime of site? In our case whenever our server was down for seconds also cloudflare showed error page and sometimes cloudflare showed error page that they could not connect even when our server response time was just slow but pages on other domains were still loading fine.

[Tom-Anthony]

Hi,

1. I have used CloudFlare for a few sites and never had an issue with this. It is a risk/concern with all shared hosting, but CloudFlare are very proactive about addressing anything impacting their customers, so I would not have a concern on this side of things at all.

2. Again, I wouldn't have concerns here. CloudFlare are very adept at handling large-scale DDOS attacks . Having read some of their post-attack analysis reports, they usually mitigate any impact to customers very quickly. They have loads of customers, and if this sort of thing was an issue I think we'd hear about it fairly often.

3. I can't speak to the % of users that might get falsely identified as a risk and presented a CAPTCHA, but I'd be very surprised if it was as high as 1-2%; I've rarely seen that CAPTCHA screen myself. You should check what CloudFlare have to say on this issue, but I would have no concern here either.

I have never had an issue with CloudFlare impacting SEO performance or impacting the user experience. It has generally performed well for me, but the biggest issue I see with it is people hoping it is a 'cure all' and means they don't need to properly address issues affecting the performance of their site. If your database performance is very poor, meaning dynamic pages take a long time to load, then CloudFlare is not the answer (it may help - but you should address the underlying issue).

I am unsure about the issue with CloudFlare failing when your server is slow - I'd imagine CloudFlare support could help you with this - there may be a configuration option somewhere.

Overall - my suggestion would be that you go for it.

[lcourse]

Thanks Tom.
I will move now one of my main domains and will use their PRO plan. Noticed they have quite a number of settings to address the false positives. Our problem with cloudflare error pages may have been a temporary one while they where building the cache of the site. Anyway it is easy to enable/disable the cloudflare protection. So not much risk here. Could save us of a lot of potential headache in the future if it works as advertised.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

You may be interested in this post titled "Cloudflare and SEO" : https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-seo/

"We did a couple things. First, we invented a new technology that, when it detects a problem on a site, automatically changes the site's CloudFlare IP addresses to isolate it from other sites. (Think of it like quarantining a sick patient.) Second, we worked directly with the crawl teams at the big search engines to make them aware of how CloudFlare worked. All the search engines had special rules for CDNs like Akamai already in place. CloudFlare worked a bit differently, but fell into the same general category. With the cooperation of these search teams we were able to get CloudFlare's IP ranges are listed in a special category within search crawlers. Not only does this keep sites behind them from being clustered to a least performant denominator, or incorrectly geo-tagged based on the DNS resolution IP, it also allows the search engines to crawl at their maximum velocity since CloudFlare can handle the load without overburdening the origin."

[lcourse]

Thanks Cyrus.