Hi
I have two of my sites registered and working fine with Cloudflare on a Pro account…at $40 per month
I notice however on my Plesk Server that there is a Plesk Server Shield Plus available as an extension and looks to be easily deployable at £22 ($30?) per month for ALL websites.
Both seem to offer similar speed and protection advantages is it worth moving from the Pro to the SSP? any reason not to?
Would your seriously ask Cloudflare THAT question? 
I am not familiar at all with this Shield Plus, so I cant comment on it, however if you have the same features at a dramatically lower price it might be worth it. Though the question is, do you actually have the same features? What about the geographically distributed and anycasted network of proxies? Does this Shield Plus come with that too, respectively is that of importance to you?
Ha, I thought they might offer an honest answer 
I am a photographer based in UK, but travel throughout Europe with work. So perhaps I dont need a global presence as such just the robust firewall offering and overall website speed up, in which case the Plesk extension sounds like good value
Never expect sales to be honest
Well, it depends where your audience is. If it is primarily in the UK, the global network might not be such an incentive for you as there are “just” three PoPs in the UK.
What is your primary reason to use Cloudflare?
thanks for taking trouble to reply, I use CloudFlare to speed up an image heavy site, offer better security and built in SSL
Please dont tell me you are not having a certificate on your server too
How many site would we be talking about? With two sites you seem to save $10. Do both of your current sites need to be on Pro plan? (I guess @cs-cf will want to crucify me now for downselling you 
)
As I mentioned, I am terribly unfamiliar with this Shield Plus, so I cant draw a proper comparison but if it is only a piece of software installed on your server, it might not be able to offer the same level of protection (particularly network-wise) as Cloudflare.
gotcha ok
This is the info you get on Plesk re the SSP “ServerShield by CloudFlare defends all your websites against online threats while making them load lightning fast.”
That sounds good to me : - )
I suppose one other issue are client photo sites from the sub domain of which there are hundreds. I go out and do a shoot, make a website and send the link to the client, I have about 300 shoots per year, it would be great if they loaded fast and were secure too etc, as these by their very nature very image heavy.
It sounds like the SSP sounds like a better option for a small business in the UK
Sounds very much like marketing language to me
From that description it is impossible - for me at least - to make any judgement what they offer on a technical level.
I would repeat my question. Do your current sites both need a paid account to begin with?
Also, how do you configure these client specific sites? Are these domains on their own or just part of your main domain? Could you post a few examples?
I was told I did by an SEO company which might have been overkill advice…
main site https://www.piranhaphotography.com
Client Site
https://clients.piranhaphotography.com//recorded-future/25thApril2019/index.html#1
for example…The ‘clients’ subdomain has many clients/websites etc hundreds
In this case clients is a host record just like www. You wouldnt need to pay separately here, as it will all be covered under your actual domain.
I certainly cant comment on each of your use cases, but - and I might get crucified once more for downselling - to me it seems you might even do fine with a free plan. Though, if you just need it for that one site you could even stay with one paid plan.
Great, although currently the clients subdomain is not via cloudflare (Lets Encrypt) it caused many problems and I had to stop using it. Not sure what the underlying problem was now but I tried for a few days then gave up, having put my fist through the screen…(I get through a lot of screens dealing with IT)
I am afraid at this point I’d have to leave a proper comparison to someone else (again, no experience with Shield Plus 
) but to me it would appear as if you should do fine with your current setup.
Thanks for all your help, food for thought - Cheers, Douglas
Hmm spoke too soon, I setup and paid for the Cloudflare Server Shield for Plesk (there is very little to set up in fairness, just switch it on and off) and now no emails are coming through…It implied that you either have one or the other (ie ServerShield or a normal Cloudflare site, so I removed the sites from CLoudflare and tried to let ServerShield do its thing…it didnt, just error messages…
A record in Cloudflare DNS goes to IP address of server
MX record to mail server
and a txt entry for v=spf1 mx a ~all
Webmail works fine and the sites are up and running just no email client is receiving anything (Apple mail just says server unreachable)
I have now removed the extension from Plesk in a hope that things will get back to normal, but no luck so far, still no client emails and its back to work tomorrow>.
Any suggestions?
Solved it, copy over all DNS entries from server then just grey cloud everything, and the email comes back on, then orange cloud DNS entries one by one till the emails stop, reverse one step and all is well. Websites Cloudflare protected, emails and ftp work fine. Not the most scientific method but works well for someone with limited knowledge on these matters.
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