Is Hostgator Cloudflare Good?

The answer is NOT (in my point of view). Reasons? You need to change Name Server for Hostgator Cloudflare to work, When CloudFlare is down your blog is down…

If you don’t know what Hostgator Cloudflare is, you can read more here. Now let’s talk about what it offers.

What does CloudFlare offers?

CloudFlare offers some of the unbelievable benefits, no matter if you are a small blog or a large websites. After I come to know about it through those awesome posts, I googled, made some study, read a number of reviews before I decided to enable it on my blog.

• Increase blog loading speed and performance

CloudFlare has its servers all over the globe and your readers always find the resources nearer to them. This will improve your blog loading speed and improve the performance overall.

• Your blog is up even when your host is down

Appears amusing but your blog is always up even at times when your web host is down for some reason. Though in offline mode (read only), the readers can always access your site. Something is always better than nothing!

• Always protected from malicious bots and spammers

This is another great benefit you can expect if you enable CloudFlare. CloudFlare uses data from Project Honey Pot and other third party sources, as well as the data from its community, to identify malicious threats online and stop the attacks before they even get to your site. They say the system learns through its experience to protect you better.

• The most honest stats for you blog

Because the automated hits, the nasty bots and search engine crawls are excluded from the count, you can have the most accurate stats for your blog. You have good tools to evaluate human traffic coming to your site, but no insight into search engine crawlers and threats. With CloudFlare, now you do.

• It’s FREE

It seems to good right now and there is no reasons to not enable Hostgator Cloudflare? Here are the drawbacks:

What stopped me from activating it for two days?

The pros of CloudFlare are too good and it must be because I come to know it recently, I did not know exactly if it was required, was it good for me, or was it better without it.

• You need to change Name Server for it to work

It’s something troubling. I host my blog on HostGator and I am happy with it. It was something uncomfortable to change the Name Servers to something else. Now I know, if you are hosting in HostGator, you can enable CloudFlare from within your cPanel. No need to change name server. However if your host does not have this service, please read below.

• When CloudFlare is down your blog is down

I am looking for solution that keeps my blog when the host is down but what if the CloudFlare server is down? Was it not going to be the same problem the other way round? Does it really do any good if it is like so?

• Cloudflare throws your traffic

Cloudflare maintains extremely strict security mechanisms to protect their system from overloaded. It blocks any suspicious requests,  IP addresses… Consequently, your website is also affected.

• Affect to your SEO ranking

Using Cloudflare means that you have to share the same IP with many other websites. If you have several websites using Cloudflare, all sites may have a single IPs as seen by search engines. In addition, many spammers are using Cloudflare to hide their real IPs so the IP of Cloudflare can be in blacklist at any time.

Conclusions

I’m not entirely against using Hostgator CloudFlare. The features are impressive given that the service is free. But I wish Cloudflare was as impressive as it claims to be – no 404  error for existing pages,”always online” and be transparent. I’m not closing my door to this CDN service. I will keep my eyes open,  monitor this site and see if their impressiveness has improved.