So far my experience with Cloudflare has been mixed. Initially, I was really impressed at how easy it was to transfer my sites from Google. Setting up my email was also pretty straightforward. However, I have had a hell of a time getting my sites online.
I think there are two main issues. First issue is that my firewall settings are incredibly restrictive. I don’t know the first thing about firewalls, and I have been questioning my new friend Chat GPT about how to set up rules. Right now it seems to be working, but I still think there is something I’ve missed. The second issue is there seems to be a conflict between Caddy and Cloudflare in the DNS department. I had to find a new build of caddy for docker that included a special module.
Now, I have about 50% functionality on all of my sites. But hey! I have three sites working!One of the things that drove me to this madness was that I could not figure out how to use DDNS with multiple sites and Google Domains. I set up ddclient to update Cloudflare everyday and after a reboot (again thanks to a little help from my friend GPT).
Let’s talk about that other 50%. Right now it seems like my sites are available both in and out of my home network. For a while, I could only access things from inside which I think was a firewall issue. When the sites load, they tend to take a while, maybe a caching issue? And in the case of dumbleigh.com, some things just don’t load. I am currently attempting to author this post in the app on my phone because the new post page wouldn’t load. Some of my services aren’t working like my vault warden and next cloud installations.
All in all I’m happy with the progress despite the barbs that have slowed me down. I am very happy about the move to Cloudflare. I have been probing some of the security options and I am blown away with how basic Google domains seems now. Cloudflare presents a ton of data about where traffic is coming from, and even allows you to select what traffic gets through based on geolocation. And it’s free. No matter where your site is registered, you can change your name servers to cloud flares and have access to all of the DNS management. If you do switch to Cloudflare, they charge about $10 to move your site over which is basically just the cost of the registration. I thought Google domains was cheap at $12, now it seems like it represented far less value considering the management tools. One downside to having all of those tools is that I get to see more of how I was exposing myself. In just a couple of days, Cloudflare told me it blocked 50 some attempted attacks on dumbleigh.com. Yeah, self-hosting is fun!