I had similar experiences with CloudFlare. Wanted to use them, but they could give me absolutely 0 visibility into why they thought my site was down. I could load it in another tab using the raw address while CloudFlare kept serving the couldn't contact page.
Support was fairly unhelpful, basically just saying "sometimes this happens, and it usually clears up".
I also had problems when I tried CloudFlare. Different problems, but it cost me a few days contacting users and apologising before I U-turned and switched the nameservers back.
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.
I too had the same issue with CloudFlare. The solution was to email support@cloudflare.com. You won't find this address on their website unless you're logged in.
I sent you an e-mail describing the incident in detail, with a link to the support request I opened at the time of the incident.
I actually really do like Cloudflare a lot, for the record, so I'd be glad if it turned out to be something more innocuous. But at the time, Support said they'd look into it, and I got nothing but radio silence since then.
Yup. I run into this a lot with Firefox and it's super frustrating when some website's homepage just gives you a cloudflare error and a message that says "bummer bro, you're not allowed to see this. Here's a Ray ID that won't actually help you fix the issue"
I've let airlines and other companies know that Cloudflare isn't letting me buy their products but unsurprisingly they don't care (or tell me to clear my cookies)
Cloudflare is not having any issue, it's just used here as a proxy to help with caching and static files. The real server hosting the application is down.
Honestly we were confused by the whole partnership. We kept submitting tickets to Dreamhost which they did a poor job of fulfilling. We liked the idea of Cloudflare and we were mostly willing to stick it out. Not only that, but we had several great ideas about how we might leverage your offering against some other things that we wanted to accomplish.
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 remember this happening. The 20 some sites we ran went down as they were supported by cloudflare. I spent a panicked 30 minutes trying to figure out what I had done wrong, to eventually find out it was on CF's end.
I remember voicing at our team meeting "boy, they must be panicking at CloudFlare."
Cloudflare works so spectacularly we just wrote it off as a one time thing.
CloudFlare really messes a lot of things up. I've seen CloudFlare refuse to give me error responses from forms before. Enter a bad value, get a cached page of the empty form, lol. Server was trying to return a page explaining the wrong entry, but CloudFlare refused to send it to me because it had a non-200 response.
Support was fairly unhelpful, basically just saying "sometimes this happens, and it usually clears up".
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