I found a website k6.io which allows you to load test websites and API’s using AWS. With a free account you can test from one location with 50 virtual units for up to 12 mins. Spinning up a load test of get requests, Cloudflare served up all the traffic no problem, leaving my minimal VPS web-server alone. Then I tried again with post requests and BAM… 100% CPU load, response time over 6 seconds.

What was happening? Shouldn’t Cloudflare stop things like this?

According to my page revision history, 9 months ago I started writing a guide on using Cloudflare as a free CND for websites. I’m sure I’ll finish that eventually, but for now here is why I think it is so great. Free load balancing!

Introduction

I recently move my website form an OVH hosted solution, to an OVH VPS (virtual private server). Doing things yourself is often much cheaper, but can be more complex. Web solutions like Square Space offer fast, reliable hosting which scales to sudden demand. However for £10 a month it is nearly three times more expensive than my VPS and it is possible to get the same level of performance and scaling, thanks to Cloudflare.