I have almost 100 domains parked on top of my primary site, and they are all marketed independently based on the demographic. My business is 21 years old, and is my primary source of income (although revenue is about 1/4th of what it was pre-COVID, so money is tight).
I have about 5-10 million pageviews per month, but it’s hard to be accurate since ad blockers prevent me from having an accurate count. I’ve always used CSF (ConfigServer Firewall) to block non-US IPs, so the traffic is almost entirely in the US. The site is all hand-coded, no templates.
I originally began using Cloudflare when I signed up for Ezoic ad network, but I’ve found that I need more of the Cloudflare features than Ezoic offers so I need to use my own CF account.
I specifically need these features:
block non-US IPs, which I think will require 1 page rule
the ability to turn off Cloudflare for specific directories and/or pages to prevent caching
Since changing to Ezoic, I’ve had a HUGE spike in server load from bad bots :-/ I want to be able to block these, too, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to block them in CSF after setting up the Cloudflare account or if that will need to be done in Cloudflare.
And it would be great to have a more accurate count of how many requests make it to the site that aren’t bots, which I would be able to use for direct-sell stats.
Will I be able to satisfy my needs with the free account, or do I need the Pro or Business account?
I see the comparison page, but it’s not exactly clear to me what some of the features are, whether I need or want those features, or how difficult it is to upgrade or downgrade in the future. I’m also not sure if there are any traffic limitations on the lower accounts that would require me to have an upper account.
Plan-wise, start with Free. It’s good for most needs.
What do you mean “turn off Cloudflare”? Proxying is DNS-Based, so once you proxy that hostname, all traffic for that hostname will go through Cloudflare.
If it’s just caching, then you can use a Cache Rule to bypass cache:
Ezoic has an option in their dashboard where I can “Exclude Pages”, and it lets me enter in directories, pages, or regex (eg, /foo/.+/bar) to be completely excluded from everything. I’m just guessing that I would need something similar in Cloudflare.
My users log in, and I have an Ajax script running that shows their logged-in username and how many private messages they have. After signing up with Ezoic, though, I had several users report that they were seeing someone else’s username and messages!!! I added those scripts to the Excluded section and haven’t had any more reports, so I’m 90% sure that it was due to Ezoic and/or Cloudflare caching the page. I need to ensure that I can exclude them from any and all caching in the CF dashboard, too.
Is that something I can do using the Cache Rule?
Assuming so, do Cache Rules count towards the limit of 3 Page Rules that come with the free account? I have 3 directories set for exclusion in Ezoic:
/cgi-bin (which includes sub-directories)
/includes
/chat
If I have to create 3 Cache Rules for those and then another rule to block non-US IPs, would need the $20 /month Pro account since the free account only allows for 3 Page Rules? Or does the option to block non-US IPs fall under a WAF rule (of which the free version has 5)?