Update August 7, 2019: Cloudfare is a powerful force on the web today, and can be of benefit to phpLD users and webmasters as a whole, as it can help prevent Denial of Service attacks and much more. Definitely there has been no shortage of criticism for this company, but they have weathered the storm and are still going strong. We want to especially commend them for refusing to host 4chan. As you may or may not know, 4chan has been used by hate groups online, and for other illegal activity.
Update December 1, 2012
While we previously recommended Cloudflare, we are no longer recommending it. Many of our users actually ended up having more downtime, or found features from Cloudflare buggy. If you have problems with speed with phpLD, this is something we can help you solve without using Cloudflare, and if you want to use a Cloudflare alternative, Amazon Cloudfront and Max CDN would be good options.
Original Article:
Let me preface by saying this is the most exciting application I have seen for a website in at least a year. Please stay with me as I go over the important points that relate to phpLD. And note that we are not benefiting financially from telling you about CloudFlare. It is just super cool and a wonderful technology that will benefit many people.
Probably the most exciting thing CloudFlare is going to do for your phpLD is eliminate even more spam. It gets data both from the large network of sites it serves as well as sources like Google and Project Honeypot. Comment and forum spammer IP addresses don’t even get a chance to visit your site. They are challenged before entry.
Speed is the next great benefit. From preloading popular resources to minifying javascript and css files, CloudFlare will speed up your site dramatically! I’ve already tested on sites large and small and am seeing around 50% speed increase on average. There have been reports of some users actually seeing their search results improve simply by speeding up their site. Note that google has mentioned speed is now a factor is rankings.
Once you get CloudFlare working on your site, I would highly encourage you to signup with VigLink which basically will give you one more way to make money on your directory without costing you a dime. Just turn it on. What is does is automatically give you credit for links if those links point to sites that have affiliate programs. It doesn’t mess with any of your other links and does not even add a tracking code to your URL. It just follows the links to the affiliate site and gives you credit if they buy. If you have a directory with a lot of links, chances are high that you will start seeing clicks immediately.
So what are you waiting for! Go check out CloudFlare! We are already using it on this site!
Best Wishes,
phpLD
P.S. Oh, and one note on the settings in Cloudflare…
They have a new feature called Rocket Loader in beta. I would recommend not turning that on as there have been a few reports about IE 8 users having trouble.
