Stay away from Cloudflare

Some time back I became a little obsessive about increasing my site’s speed and I did a lot of thing and managed to get my page loading time come down to half than earlier.

1 thing I did was to use cloudflare to get a free CDN for my site. It did some better things by getting the response time down but the thing that made me ditch cloudflare is the captcha they place on the incoming traffic. You might have seen that page.

As they say they place this captcha page to screen the malicious attacker but what got my attention is that they place this Google AdSense ads on those page. If the page is for attacker then why are they placing that page. Some may argue that they are giving free service so they have to cover the cost somehow. May be. But isn’t its against the AdSense policy to get ads clicked by robots.

Ok I ask you. If you know some page is going to get hit by robots regularly and you may lose your AdSense account then will you place your ads on those pages? I won’t.

I removed the cloudflare after using it for some time because it was showing me that captcha page every time I visited my own website (may be I am a attacker on my own site, at least they consider I am). Its quite annoying seeing that page even though I was getting benefit of it. Think about the visitors who are not getting anything from cloudflare, how annoying it is for them.

After I removed my traffic jumped a bit. I don’t mind my site being slow if the traffic goes up. I don’t think you will mind either.