Just wanted to warn everyone of Cloudflare’s feature ‘Argo’ which is supposed to improve site speed.
After receiving an email from CF, I decided to try it for a few days. I didn’t notice any improvement at all with my website and after turning it off, I got my latest bill and noticed they had charged me $209.30 for the total of 4 days that I tried this useless feature.
I emailed CF trying to get a refund and they did nothing to help.
Not worth it at all. I’m so disgusted with this company right now.
Argo is usage based as @domjh posted. Also make sure you’re properly measuring your page load speed metrics with Argo enabled vs disabled and not just basing it on visual/eye person experience. I’ve enabled Argo for 2 weeks now and measuring and tracking Argo improvements on my forums at https://community.centminmod.com/threads/Cloudflare-argo-smart-routing-in-action.17517/ including per Cloudflare datacenter metrics.
It improve connection speed between ORIGIN SERVER to Cloudflare EDGE location.
But it charge for bandwidth between ORIGIN SERVER to Cloudflare EDGE + Cloudflare EDGE to ENDUSER. I do not understand when you are only optimizing path ORIGIN SERVER to Cloudflare EDGE location, we should be only charged for that.
Even the concept of ORIGIN SERVER to Cloudflare EDGE is faulty. Suppose I am from DELHI (They dont give delhi edge or any india edge location even for business plan users). We get mostly Singapore or LHR edge location.
Suppose for 1 day I was getting Singapore location. I was charged from signapore to my server location and from singapore edge to my end user. Now, things which are cached in singapore location I won’t get charged for singapore edge to my origin server.
But Cloudflare want to increase my bill. So it will start serving me to LHR location or some other location. Now I have to rebuild my cache in that edge location and I will get charged again for EDGE to ORIGIN and EDGE to END USER.
PS: even with Argo they do not give india edge location for business plan users.
I’m aware it’s based on usage. I’m also aware charging $209.30 for 4 days of use when I didn’t notice any improvements (in testing) and in using the site is ridiculous.
I guess this is more of a review to warn others. It’s not worth it. Not even close.
@user3011, there’s definitely something wrong with the billing.
I don’t get nearly enough visitors to be charged $209.30 for 4 days of use. I’m glad I didn’t notice an improvement because otherwise, I would have continued to use it. The only reason I stopped using it was because I didn’t think it helped my site.
I’ve used Workers in the past so I thought the billing would be similar. If my billing is correct, then this is not affordable for anyone other than big businesses and organizations who have money to throw away.
How much bandwidth is going through Cloudflare Argo for you ??
I definitely keep an eye on my bandwidth used for Argo and it’s low amount so digestible for now.
and my Cloudflare Zone Analytics API scripts bandwidth numbers for the month broken down by ssl protocols, content mime types and top 20 countries
FYI, my page sizes range from 150-450KB for local served content and around 2-3x that once you add 3rd party adsense/analytics scripts (which don’t count towards Argo bandwidth).
Hi @Blogger650, if you think there are issues with the bandwidth calculations or something else off with your bill, can you let Support know? To contact Cloudflare Customer Support, login & go to https://dash.cloudflare.com/?account=support and select get more help. Please give Support the complete details and link to your Community post. When you receive the email confirmation and ticket number, reply and ask for billing support. That’ll get it in the proper queue and they can take a look at the details.
