Comment by gbrayut
10 years ago
I am on the SRE team for Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow mentioned in the article. We have had a lot of issues with 503 errors (Cloudflare cannot reach our origin servers) occurring in various regions on a monthly basis. That combined with a few other issues (DNS change delays, missed deadlines) has lead us to look for another CDN provider.
We just signed a new contract and plan on switching off CloudFlare in June.
We use CF and haven't seen any 503 issues recently. We don't use their DNS service since that's down more often than it's up, so it's possible that's what you're seeing?
As for the article, you can just set CF to 'Essentially Off' and it doesn't do anything stupid.
If you configure CF properly, it's hard to beat.
FWIW we've used Cotendo, Akamai, EdgeCast/Verizon, etc. For $200/month, CF can't be beat. It's not as fast as EC (easily the fastest CDN for most of the planet), but it's also 15x cheaper.
I hope you didn't sign with Akamai.