I recently suffered massive and targeted DDOS attacks on my servers rendering them useless.
This is when i really discovered Cloudflare and Sucuri for security,
In the past i had tried Cloudflare on both VB4 and VB5 but it was very hard to control the caching and security and I was finding people couldn't log or register in some cases and stuff wasn't updating right. So i ended up moving off cloudflare but i had never had any real issues with attacks.
So along come the attacks and the first thing i try is moving my sites behind cloudflare.
My VB5 forum was not being attacked so it was fine and I was able to get it working good behind cloudflare.
The VB4 forum was under attack so i moved the site under Sucuri.
I found the forum worked better under Sucuri since they are not a CDN but only a security provider and you can easily turn off their caching.
Sucuri does not offer a free option so you always have to pay at least $20 a month for service.
I wasn't able to control the attacks under Sucuri but I believe it was because i had their solution for attacks misconfigured.
Cloudflare does offer free service to any sites and allows you to register unlimited sites.
They allow this to attract new customers but also they can advertise to enterprise customers about their data throughput capabilities.
So in the end I had about 20 interdependent sites on one server so I ended up moving everything under cloudflare since it was free.
I do pay for some of my busier sites as it offers more options and rules.
Cloudflare also makes it easier to block countries.
You can create many rules but for Vbulletin the most useful is turning off all caching and security, at least to start with.
This is the only way I can stop my forums from acting strangely is to turn most of the cloudflare functionality off.
You still benefit from the basic firewall functionality hiding your ip address and filtering out known attackers and attacks.
My VB4 forums had a lot of spammers and bots but cloudflare siginificantly reduced that with no configuration.
On VB5 there is basically no spammers or bots at all under cloudflare, although there was not much before.
This is when i really discovered Cloudflare and Sucuri for security,
In the past i had tried Cloudflare on both VB4 and VB5 but it was very hard to control the caching and security and I was finding people couldn't log or register in some cases and stuff wasn't updating right. So i ended up moving off cloudflare but i had never had any real issues with attacks.
So along come the attacks and the first thing i try is moving my sites behind cloudflare.
My VB5 forum was not being attacked so it was fine and I was able to get it working good behind cloudflare.
The VB4 forum was under attack so i moved the site under Sucuri.
I found the forum worked better under Sucuri since they are not a CDN but only a security provider and you can easily turn off their caching.
Sucuri does not offer a free option so you always have to pay at least $20 a month for service.
I wasn't able to control the attacks under Sucuri but I believe it was because i had their solution for attacks misconfigured.
Cloudflare does offer free service to any sites and allows you to register unlimited sites.
They allow this to attract new customers but also they can advertise to enterprise customers about their data throughput capabilities.
So in the end I had about 20 interdependent sites on one server so I ended up moving everything under cloudflare since it was free.
I do pay for some of my busier sites as it offers more options and rules.
Cloudflare also makes it easier to block countries.
You can create many rules but for Vbulletin the most useful is turning off all caching and security, at least to start with.
This is the only way I can stop my forums from acting strangely is to turn most of the cloudflare functionality off.
You still benefit from the basic firewall functionality hiding your ip address and filtering out known attackers and attacks.
My VB4 forums had a lot of spammers and bots but cloudflare siginificantly reduced that with no configuration.
On VB5 there is basically no spammers or bots at all under cloudflare, although there was not much before.
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