The web host was HostGator (shared reseller account), and a chat technician confirmed my suspicion: they do not (yet) support IPv6 mapping that CloudFlare provides. So if you’ve enabled the IPv6 feature from CloudFlare’s settings and your site suddenly disappears, make sure your host supports the IPv6 protocol. Disabling the feature (it’s just a feature you can disable!!) restored the blog to its happy former state. That is all.

I host several projects on MediaTemple DV plans for the stability, flexibility, and top-notch support. (I’d rather not be troubleshooting server issues for clients at 3AM.) You can certainly use CloudFlare without MediaTemple hosting, they’ve just made it a one-step add-on service that you’d have to be a drooling idiot to mess up. I warily enabled the service for a static site, which involved signing up for a free account (email address, password) and enabling the service in MediaTemple’s control panel. A CNAME record was automatically created in the DNS settings, and that’s it.

I visited said site and it had an immediately-noticable zing. Excitedly, I added the service to workingconcept.com to see how CloudFlare would cripple the ExpressionEngine setup. I was sure it’d fail and I’d have to revert, but I tried it anyway. I was blown away – CloudFlare seemed to have absolutely no effect but to dramatically speed up page delivery. Below is my non-scientific evaluation…

just-ping.com results, before CloudFlare (MediaTemple DV4.0, Virginia datacenter)

just-ping.com results, with CloudFlare

As you can see, ping times were easily improved across the board. Remember that this is less than an hour after enabling the service.

Pingdom Full Page Test

I use Pingdom to monitor my own website and client web apps, and they’ve got all kinds of great tools. Here I used the Full Page Test to compare page load time. This test loads an entire page and basically gives you an overview of the process: how long it takes, what assets are loaded, the order in which things stack up.

The result: page load from 4.7 seconds to 1.8 seconds.

I did nothing but switch on the service. I’d say that’s a significant plus for a product that’s totally free.

Wordy Conclusion

Yesterday I could have cared less about CloudFlare, but today I suddenly can’t live without it. I’m thoroughly impressed and hope this post is helpful to somebody. I don’t work for CloudFlare or get any sort of incentive for writing this post, but I would certainly take incentives if they were offered. I’ve already been experimenting with Amazon S3 as a CDN, and Rackspace CloudFiles – both offered inexpensive performance gains with minimal setup, but CloudFiles is another thing entirely! The pro and enterprise upgrades offer increased protection and fine-tuning along with a variety of genuinely-enticing features. As of this moment I’m still using the free account, which is serving pages much faster and allegedly adding a layer of protection from various types of attacks. Once they fix that placeholder logo of theirs I’ll be proudly recommending it to everybody I can find!

input[type="email"] { 
	box-shadow: none;
}

I’ve also made a habit of having textareas size automatically when the page loads, in the even that there’s already text in the field to be edited:

$('textarea.autosize').autoResize().trigger('change');

After hours of searching for said app, I stumbled upon Mikeal Simburger’s KillWhite, a Photoshop plugin (and 64-bit PixelBender plugin!) that does the same thing. And what a relief. It works just as well as the mysterious app I first used, and even better is that Mikeal is working on a version that will key out a selected color.

Comparison:

I made sure that my connection info was correct, and unlike every other PHP app install, I continued to get the error.

Assuming I still managed to get something wrong, I was good sport and used a barebones PHP script to test the connection info. To my surprise, it worked. The problem had to be with WordPress.

After a few hours of experimenting, I found the problem. I had created a test working copy on my public development server; the WordPress install I was using locally at “wp.localmachine.com” moved to “wp.devmachine.com”, and I had simply copied over the same database. The WordPress database references the site URL in several places, and you need to update these URLs in MySQL for your alternate site to work. The easiest way to do this is to dump your database to a .sql file, then find and replace the original domain (“localmachine.com”) with the new one (“devmachine.com”). Then import the resulting .sql file on the new server.

If you’d rather update the new database by hand, I believe you’ll need to change domain references in wp_site, wp_options, and wp_blogs. But be careful, wp_posts and several other areas will have references to your old domain.

Careful with those quotas. And that’s the blog post you’ve been waiting ~3 months for.

Nuff said.