I wanted to tell you all about a service called cloudflare

[NMTEACO]

Take a look at cloudflare... (https://www.cloudflare.com/)

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

I have been using it for the last few weeks and it has worked perfectly. Its easy to setup, and started working without interruption on my site. Because we all have shopping carts and SSL certificates if you want to use this service your going to have to pay the 20 a month so you get SSL, but it means you don't have to have it though another company, so that saves you $100 a year. Also the bandwidth savings means you maybe able to use a lower plan on 3dcart to make up the cost.

Another nice thing about the service is you take DNS control away from 3dcart... meaning you no longer have to ask them to make DNS changes, you can do it all from CloudFlare's site on your own.

This might sound scary, changing you name servers away form 3dcart, but they figure out all the settings automatically, and as i said there was no interruption in service.

I have no vested interest in anyone using the service, other then I think its cool and helpful. If you have any questions about it, feel free to post here.

PS... if you want to check out how the SSL cert looks you can visit my site...

https://www.nmteaco.com/

[cbsteven]

Interesting. I had never heard about this before and at first I was skeptical. I've looked into it a bit more now and read a couple reviews (such as http://developdaly.com/web-design/cl...ounce-rate-94/ ) and I'm intrigued. I'll definitely be giving it a shot.

[lml]

NMTEACO,

When i view your home page (on Google Chrome), I get the https on your url crossed out & a message stating that "this page includes other resources which are not secure. These resources can be viewed by others while in transit, and can be modified by an attacker to change the behavior of the page"...

I think this would put off potential customers.

[cbsteven]

His site works fine for me in Chrome (https is green, not crossed out)

[lml]

It must be a setting on my browser, when I right click on the url I can select "open url" & it changes it to green & no crossout.

Still, there are probably Chrome users with similar settings and it would turn them off buying.

Makes me think twice about CloudFlare if it is the cause.

[NMTEACO]

Its not cloud flare... It has to do with content that I'm pulling from a non secure URL... You would not normally view the home page in https... I have done a lot of heavy editing to the template files, and sometimes i do the code wrong and it messes up the HTTPS side of things. I have been trying to catch all the little things (using a full path name of an image will break your ssl every time), but sometimes my css code is still pulling content in a wrong way.

Check out https://www.nmteaco.com/crm.asp?action=add

That page should be configured properly to work with ssl.

[lml]

Still get it crossed out on that link.

[NMTEACO]

http://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checke...asp?action=add

This tests ok... so any issue is my fault... But thank you for pointing it out, ill have to look deeper into the issue.

On a related note, does anyone know of any tools that will analyze a site to figure out what exactly is causing the break in ssl?

[kem]

China has 1,827 networks and 268,812,544 subnets. But, the ISO code is CN.
Do you suppose that 3dCart can address that? Yahoo has figured this out.

[edcroteau]

Has anyone else tried Cloudflare with their 3dcart. I'm nervous about the SSL issue. Plus I've already paid for it (recently) and probably won't get money back from the evil GoDaddy ...

I'm using Cloudflare on my Joomla front-end sites and it appears to be working well without negative incidents.

I like the idea of using it for 3dcart as a way to prevent spam, reduce bandwidth, speed up page loads, etc. but I'm hesitant as I mentioned above due the SSL issues.

Looking for more real world users !

Ed

[Apex]

So has anyone else setup Cloudflare on a 3dcart site? I'm not worried about the $20/month, im more worried about it blocking an actual customer on rare occasions. What if that one customer that got blocked was a $2000 order or something?

[lml]

Hello Apex,

In the week I've used CloudFlare, it's cut our bandwith use in half by blocking out 3 areas that I don't sell to (China, Russia & Africa).
Site speed appears to have quickened as well, but I'll wait until more time has elapsed before I pass judgement.

Your customer...why do you think he would be blocked?
You have total control over which countries you wish to block...if any.
As far as I can see he would only be blocked further if he is a known threat on their system.

[cbsteven]

I installed it two days ago and I'm impressed by the service and the level of customizability. I recommend it.

[Apex]

LML and Cbsteve,

Did you guys go with the Pro Account and get the SSL from Cloudflare as well?

[cbsteven]

I signed up for the Pro account. Still waiting on the SSL to be activated (3DCart support has to do something)