I use the Discourse Forum, and I just turned “on” the proxy service on Cloudflare. After that, I noticed that my website was immediately broken until I turned it off.
Can’t I just use it along with the proxy status “on” on the website?
official website is here
If the website is flooded, someone can easily launch a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack.
Thank You
Hey @bigneshwardas
Cloudflare can be configured to work with Discourse, but it’s generally inadvisable to do so.
Discourse isn’t a website in the conventional sense, it’s a single-page JavaScript app. With the CloudFlare proxy enabled, every client-server request is going to be delayed by taking those extra hops across the CloudFlare network.
Is your site at legitimate risk of DDOS, or is this just something you want to enable as a precaution?
If you’re determined to get things working you will need to ensure that a page rule at CloudFlare has been configured to ‘Disable Performance’ for the entire domain which serves the Discourse site, as CloudFlare has been known to interfere with the contents of the JavaScript app.
You will also need to ensure that the container has been rebuilt after you add the CloudFlare template to your app.yml.
I would recommend running with the proxy disabled, and revisit this in the future.
According to this website, our IP is exposed along with our server provider. Is this an indication that we are under a serious DDoS attack? So, as a precaution, we want to do this.
What are the advantages of disabling performance? Caching and other performance mechanisms are enabled. And if we disable performance and enable the proxy, the website will be very slow.
We are using a very powerful server, but we suspect that it will be very slow if we enable all of this. And what’s the surety that if we disable performance and leave the proxy “on” the website will still run fast?
Thank You
No. It’s how most web sites work. Unless you run a community that it for some reason likely to be targeted by DDOS attacks, it’s not something to worry about. Discourse has some protections for DOS attacks.
Your web site will work.
Discourse does the optimizations itself, so those that Cloudflare adds (that don’t break your site) don’t help much. And putting it in front of your site will mostly slow it down since all traffic will need to travel from your server to cloudflare and then the end user.
If you are really concerned about performance you can use a traditional CDN (like bunny.net, or AWS Cloudfront) and move your assets to a Configure an S3 compatible object storage provider for uploads.
There are topics that you can find about which Cloudflare speedups work with Discourse.
Thank you very much for your assistance, time, and knowledge. much appreciated. Your support and guidance have been invaluable, and I truly appreciate the time and effort you have put in to assist me.