Last January I enabled Cloudflare (DNS only) for a customer a couple of weeks before an annual online registration event. Nothing was tweaked as far as any Cloudflare settings. We wanted to mainly put it in place for the firewall and security features.
At the same time we enabled Cloudflare we migrated from an HTML site hosted on Network Solutions to a Godaddy hosted WordPress site. Stupid hosting decisions aside when the registration event went live the users surged from from about 5 an hour to a little over 100 an hour for a duration of about 2 hours. I think most of the users for the first hour were users sitting on an entry page waiting for the registration event to start. When the clock strikes 9 they refresh the page and get a new URL to a Ninja Form that asks them for the registration details and processes the email.
The most major problem that we saw was that emails were coming in out order as far as the time stamp is concerned, some emails didn’t make it and some emails were still coming in hours later.
Can Cloudflare help with this problem or am I better off setting this up another way? Maybe it’s possible to use some sort of “service” that will ensure the traffic and form handling?
I was not referring to email support, I was referring to the fact that Cloudflare is not related in any ways to email. None of Cloudflare’s service is for emails.
Sorry you misunderstood. I’m not talking about SMTP, POP or other email services.
I’m specifically asking if Cloudflare can help with web server performance issues during a small 2 hour traffic surge or does it just help with managing traffic to the site? The emails being sent out of order seem to be a byproduct of performance.
That question is probably too specific to your particular use case and application to get a proper answer here. Cloudflare can mostly take off traffic. If that is the reason for your performance issues, Cloudflare might be a solution. Additionally you can offload certain tasks to workers, but if all that can and will fix your issues is something that can probably not be answered here.