Merry Christmas and 2012!

From everyone on S2R and here on Hostcult, have a awesome Christmas and New Years!

Cloudflare Review Part 2

So a couple of months ago i did a test and review of Cloudflare, it was getting popular and i wanted to check it out, so why a second part? Well 2 reasons, first instead of using it for a week, now i've used it for a couple of months on a couple of my sites, so i have a better view of the service, second cause i still have a couple of gripes with Cloudflare but also some nice tips to share.

My Hits with Cloudflare!
So like i said i've been using Cloudflare for a while now and i would say, its still a hit and miss for me, but mostly a hit, even with hosting your DNS through Cloudflare (and therefore losing control of your DNS ), but to be honest, unless you are paying for the really good DNS hosting, Cloudflare's DNS service is far superior, i know, cause i've used a lot of free and paid dns hosters and hosted my own and i checked it here, with just a couple of tweaks/added services their DNS could compete with the best.

Now in terms of site performance i would say its pretty spanky awesome, i've had sites that were literally hanging for dear life bashing the server and just by turning Cloudflare on, it not only relieved a lot of the stress on the server but also turned the site speed way up, that's by far the best thing about it, how much performance and how easy their CDN/Proxying system is.

My Misses with Cloudflare
But there are still today a couple of gripes, the first and largest is with their security settings and their intermission publicity type of thing they do when they block a user, as far as feedback from my visitors, i would say 100% of my visitors freak out when they reach a site and they are greeted with the cloudflare "you might be infected"! its just a fact, they expect to see a site, it really doesn't matter if they are infected, their network is bad or they have an unlucky ip, its just not standard web usage to go to a site and be greated with something else, it feels like a pop ad or intermission ad to force someone to do something, what sites like wiki-whatever.info/exclusive-experts.com (i made them up, but you know what kind of sites im talking about) do all the time while spamming Google, its a disaster in terms of usability and no type of customization will ever change my mind, people never expect a warning from a site, even Google disabled their "you might be infected" because people freaked out even if it was with the best of intentions.

There are also some misses with the "html,css,js..." optimizations, with external objects (javascript mostly), with search engines, 1 of my site was heavily penalized while switching to cloudflare (and yes turning it back after a week made it slowly return to normal, it was weird and it was reported to cloudflare staff), but 2 other saw a huge increase on traffic (I MEAN FREAKIN 400% more 300.000 users HUGE WAY!), probably due to getting faster, hehehe so again hit and miss.

What is the Cloudflare Structure?
Cloudflare seems to work a bit like this, they get datacenters on popular internet hubs around the world, popular in the sense that a lot of traffic goes through them, i would bet that altough they spend quite a bit on hardware, that they dont pay or pay very little for bandwith and do what most large providers do and have peering agreements, thats were the free cloudflare users come in, altough clouflare provides a free service they kinda need those users to have enough critical mass for these peering aggrements to be worthwhile for both parties, so altough we arent paying they need the free users, note that this isnt something evil, its awesome win-win for everyone.

The Economics of Cloudflare
How do they get paid! Humm i would say affiliates (through their detestable intermession security warning and through some of the plugins), and of course paid accounts, on this i wonder why they start the price at 20$, maybe they think most of their free users have only 1 site, and if they have more they only have to pay 5$ for each after that, well in my case at least for now its simply not economicaly viable to pay for clouflare pro, for 20$ a month you can buy yourself a whole lot of hosting, even with the added savings of a Pro account.

How do I use Cloudflare

• Basic Security Level: Essentially Off (because the bonus of blocking potential bad users doesnt outweight the really horrible spammy intermission alert)
• Caching Level: Aggressive
• Minimim Expire TTL: 4hours (but adjust this to the update schedule of your site)
• Auto Minify: JS=OFF CSS=ON HTML=ON (avoid the JS, until now it hasnt work in any of my sites and also makes Googles PageSpeed Apache Addon freakout)
• Rocket Loader: OFF
• Outbound Links: OFF
• E-Mail Address Obfuscation: OFF
• Server Side Exclude: OFF
• Always Online: OFF (still a good feature, it only shows a bar on top saying that the site is currently offline, i just turn it off as a personal preference)
• IP Geolocation: OFF
• Browser Integrity Check: OFF
• Hotlink Protection: OFF

Conclusion!
Yeah i disable most of the features, dont get me wrong if you need it or its good for you, please turn it On, still the only feature i really cant live with is the Basic Security Level for the reasons i already ranted about hehehe, but hey, freaking thumbs up for Cloudflare its free and it works pretty damn good, my only real gripe is with the security warnings, i would prefer pure blocking than any kind of  warning, the more transparent and white-label the better and im really waiting for their announced new pricing scheme to see if i can get a few pro accounts for a couple of my sites, but even so Cloudflare isnt perfect, well damn if it isn't pretty close.

4Kun! Halloween Competition

Yay we are starting a quick and dirty competition on 4kun imageboard, best picture, best halloween picture and just a random draft, with prizes, yay, so come on over and get your feet wet on the very first 4Kun! Scary Halloween Competition ^_^ and by the way have a Happy Happy Halloween!

Google Adsense is Ridiculous!

This shit keeps getting worse, talk about monopoly, i follow google adsense rules to the letter and i still keep getting the "review of your account we found that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program policies", the fact is that im always in compliant, but since there is no recourse with Google, there is no one on the other side, i have no choice but to NOT use Google Adsense on that site, its silly, stupid and arrogant.

Why? Cause they give you no choice! and i quote "Your AdSense account remains active. However, if we continue to find problems, we may disable your entire account. Therefore, we suggest that you take the time to review the rest of your network to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance with our policies.", the sites in question, are pretty big sites, galleries, blogs and directories, there is no adult content or linking to adult content, but Google decided that it links to Adult sites!

What? what are the urls of these sites that Google considers to be adult sites?

Who? are these sites, it could be any comment on the blogs/galleries or site on the directories, this is the 4th site that was found in "violation", well last time i checked the internet is all about linking, then all the fucking internet is found in violation of google adsense policy! they dont give a fuck, they change the rules in the middle of the game all the time, im a tiny client on their list, but ill tell you this, I keep finding myself getting more and more stressed with Google's bullshit and that has consequences, not today, but some day.

New Site - Eleito

Eleito is on its second incarnation, the first version was a bit to sparce and boring, and i wanted Eleito to be like a mixture between a political news blog, but also a good source of news and information around politics in Portugal, so now its a popurls like portal with all the news from all the parties in Portugal (if you are on a party that is not there, just contact us), as well as news from the major news sources, joined with our own editorial and in the future we will make more in depth articles.

Ohh and for short news bits we have our own twitter account, you can check it here eleito por todos.

New Site - Luz Portugal

Huhumm, new site, its called Luz Portugal, and of course its about Praia da Luz, Algarve, Portugal, its kinda a portal of sorts, i know there are a couple of sites kinda like this, but i wanted to make one that is nice to look at and nice to use, mixing helpful information and funny and interesting things about Praia da Luz, hehehe cool humm.

Google Vs Web Developers

 With the recent news about Google's App Engine pricing, i kinda want to give my own 2 cents, not only on that but also on Google's attitude towards web developers in general.

So just incase you werent following up, Google on its spree of canceling products, decided to not cancel the App Engine product but instead turn it into a enterprise product, the App Engine is basically a scalable hosting solution, were you can build websites or applications.

So when the App Engine debuted it was touted as a one stop app hosting solution, were you could build your web applications quickly and they would run on Google High End Systems, kind of like Amazon Cloud offerings but simpler and easier to use, well it wasnt really easy, you have the choice of Java or Phython (pretty much) and the system is a bit trickier, but at least it was cheap and once you got it up and running, it was pretty cool, so that premise brought a bunch of developers to the App Engine, hey it wasn't perfect but it was pretty easy and cheap.

 So fast forward to now and the App Engine is a completely different beast, by switching their pricing model the App Engine has become way more expensive (mostly because before you paid for what you used and now you pay for what you need to use, even if you don't use it, big difference) and im not saying like 20%, im saying 200%, and so Google's answer to the outcry was:

• Pack Up and Go, well that would be great, but most cant, cause to make the site or application you had to custom build it to fit App Engine, even if the languages were universal, moving away turns out to be a costly en-devour, so Google has you locked in (whenever i see Google announce another fake information liberation campaign i cant help but chuckle),
• Optimize your Code, if you optimize your code you can make a lot of savings, yeah im actually all for that, but to me, like many other developers, we optimize code for performance and for security, optimizing code to run cheaper is for lack of a better word idiotic! developing something is most of the times a hack job that you perfect and improve with time, with App Engine your code better be perfect from the get-go or you gonna have to...
• Pay More, you betcha, this one is easy, pay enterprise level prices or fuck off.

 So basically Google did a bait and switch, pulled in all this small developers that had the time, interest and risk to create stuff on an untested new platform as the App Engine (cause understandably Large Companies seldom risks trying new things), but now that the system is somewhat stable and ready for prime-time, those same developers get shafted, so in the end whats the point of having a scalable hosting solution if a developer cant afford it.

But this wasn't the first time and it wont be the last, Google's only interest is Google bottom-line, that's it, developing anything on top of Google Services is a huge risk, they also recently disabled a ton of API's, that a lot of sites depended on and were created on top of, also pushing Google Chrome Only/Optimized features, as well as a bunch of other services.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing Google for doing it, i'm just saying that when Google says they are making new tools for developers, new API's, new hosting platforms, support open source, supporting webmasters... that you should take those offers with a huge grain of salt, for myself, well im off the App Engine and most of my apps wont be moved over, im keeping to what i know, i learned this lesson before, with Ning, with several Hosting Providers and such, never build anything you don't have absolute control of, lesson learned.