Yep, great question.
That post was written back in 2014, when CloudFlare still had a bad reputation due to 2012, 2013, 2014 major issues in their network.
Main reason =
- Their filters weren't yet intelligent, and often blocked too much legit traffic.
- They had too many downtimes that took sites offline.
- Their default "speed" settings broke a lot of sites, mostly due to poor Javascript and CSS manipulation, and overaggrssive caching. (And honestly, this is still partially true!)
Worse yet, the myth that "CloudFlare makes your site faster" was everywhere -- but it wasn't true. It's still not true. CloudFlare makes sites ping faster, but not really load faster. It doesn't cache dynamic content, and dynamic content is always the main problem -- especially on shared servers.
The last major incident with CloudFlare was late 2014.
In January 2015, somebody (with a relation to
Hostgator!) DDoS'd this site, and CloudFlare was added as a quick fix. After some conversations with CloudFlare staff (execs, not the support desk), we decided to keep it as a paid member. The CloudFlare team understood their past errors, and has been making quite a bit of progress in 2015 and 2016 to overhaul their operation -- beginning right around the time we joined them. They've also been very open to feedback to help make the system better.
Now, all this sound, CloudFlare is not a CDN!
It's a caching network. MaxCDN is an example of a true CDN. It's CDN-like, but has many missing features that you get from a true content delivery network.
The main reason to use CloudFlare is for the caching, and the DNS-level security (ie, security before bad traffic can get to your servers).
