Overview
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT CLOUDFLARE:
Media Temple is now offering TrueSpeed CDN in place of CloudFlare. TrueSpeed is an easy to use service that includes important features like SSL support by default. If you're already using CloudFlare, you may want to consider making the switch. TrueSpeed can be purchased on its own, or as a part of the Premium Security Pack. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our award winning support team.
- Customers that had CloudFlare provisioned before January 1, 2016 will still see CloudFlare settings in their Grid Account Center.
CloudFlare is a CDN (content delivery network) with a security layer that Media Temple previously offered. This article has been maintained as a courtesy to our customers that may still be using CloudFlare.
Will CloudFlare accelerate and protect a root domain (i.e. example.com)?
CloudFlare can only accelerate and protect CNAMEs. Since root domains are an A record, we recommend that a website forwards its traffic to 'www' through their .htaccess file. If the user does not forward the traffic, then any traffic to www.example.com will be accelerated and protected by CloudFlare (and shown in the statistics) and any traffic to example.com will not be served by CloudFlare. If traffic goes to a root domain and you want to accelerate and protect the traffic using CloudFlare, you can add a redirect to 'www' in your .htaccess file.
My WordPress blog is example.com. How can I get CloudFlare to work?
In order to use WordPress, you'll need to update WordPress to use the "www." subdomain, i.e. www.example.com. For more information, please see: How can I change the domain name for my WordPress blog?
I used the Point to Another Server tool and now my sites are not working.
CloudFlare uses a CNAME record to connect to your domain using your access domain. If you use the Point to Another Server tool, this moves your Zone File and effectively breaks the CNAME CloudFlare uses.
Solution:
- Lower the TTL on the domain you moved.
- Disable CloudFlare for the domain you moved to another server.
- Wait 12 hours for the TTL interval to elapse.
- Finally, re-enable CloudFlare for the domain you moved.
I am using CloudFlare. Why are my stats behaving differently?
CloudFlare will affect your Urchin statistics. This is because your website vistiors will be viewing the cached website instead of hitting the server.
Solution
To see a comprehensive view of your overall website traffic, we encourage you to use Google Analytics. CloudFlare even includes an integrated setup for Google Analytics to make this easy!
If you use awstats or a logging system that reads the web server logs directly, you will still see all of your logs. They just look different. The connecting IP always shows up as CloudFlare, and CloudFlare reports the IP address of the visitor in an HTTP header it appends: CF-Connecting-IP. To make your logs appear in the same format as before you joined CloudFlare, there is an apache module you can run. Detailed instructions can be found in the CloudFlare wiki here: Log Files.
