What has your experience of this blog been

What has your experience of this blog been – over the past five days?

On April 6, 2012, in Blogging, by Sanjeev Sabhlok

Bandwidth usage for this blog has been rising over the past year (click for larger image):

In March 2012 bandwidth reached nearly 175GB, so I breached the overall 200GB limit of my web hosting company (I operate a good number of websites that take the remaining 25GB), leading to this and all those websites shutting down for a day. A commentator on this blog kindly suggested I move to cloudfare. I've done so.

Bandwidth is now much better managed

This month I've used only 20GB for sabhlokcity.com in the first 5 days. Projecting this, it would mean 120GB usage for the month, with total usage of 150GB, well below 200GB.

Cloudfare says (image below) that it has saved me 10GB of bandwidth so far (that's correct, for it would imply the blog was tracking at 180GB this month, consistent with last month – without Cloudfare). Cloudfare, a free service, clearly saves about one third bandwidth. That's good value.

Moving to cloudfare will allow this blog to increase its visitors by 50 per cent without threatening a repeat shut down.

Speed

Cloudfare is also supposed to increase the speed of loading. I suspect, though, that Cloudfare has slowed down the speed of loading this blog, but can't say.

Could you please provide me information about the speed (of loading) of this blog that you are experiencing? If it is a general concern, then I'll start reading up on strategies to speed up this blog, else I'll let things continue as they are.

Security

Cloudfare also claims to have stopped thousands of visits to this blog from "threats" such as web spammers, botnet zombies, exploit attackers, etc., – mostly from China. Have any of you (regular visitors) been blocked by Cloudfare? I'd be concerned if Cloudfare can't distinguish between "good" vs. "bad" visitors. [True, if you are being blocked, you won't be able to read this, either!]