I love CloudFlare. Not only because it lowers the load on our servers and speeds up page load time, but it helps us to react to problems quickly. The most obvious case is when our server goes down we can redirect all the traffic to our spare server in a matter of few clicks. But today we used it to quickly fix a marketing issue:
In our marketing newsletter we sent to all subscribed readers we haven’t spotted that the main link leads to nowhere (copy paste issue). Instead of http://www.harryfay.co.uk/sale we had http://www.harryfay.co.uk/search?chttp://www.harryfay.co.uk/sale?orderby=price&orderway=desc?tdw&utm_source=email&utm_medium=threedayweekend&utm_campaign=threedayweekend. Yes, I know we should have tested it better. We usually do, but this time we failed to click on a biggest image in the email.
Using CloudFlare I’ve set a redirect in few clicks. I know I could do the same using .htaccess, but in my book messing with .htaccess equals problems – it’s just too easy to break something there. With CF the fix was quick, instantaneous and totally painless.
