How to Use MaxCDN With CloudFlare

This guide will walk you through using your MaxCDN Pull Zone with CloudFlare.

This tutorial assumes you have already created a Pull Zone. If you plan on using custom domains to pull files from the CDN you should setup your CNAME records within the CloudFlare DNS editor, and not on the web-hosting end!

What is CloudFlare

CloudFlare is a free system that acts as a proxy between your visitors and our server. By acting as a proxy, CloudFlare caches content for your site, which lowers the number of requests to our servers, but still allows visitors to access your site.

What is a CDN?

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, and it works by acting as a reverse proxy that caches all your static contents and serves them to your website visitors from servers spread across the globe. This can lower the number of requests sent to your server to zero at any given moment, as long as the cached files are neither expired nor purged from the network. When the static contents are served to your website visitors from servers that are closer to them than your web server, the website loads faster, which provides better user experience and also reduces the load on your web server.

Conflicts

1. The First Conflict
   The way CloudFlare works includes appending cookies and custom expiry headers that look like this:
   

   sh-4.1$ curl -I domain.com
           HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
           Server: cloudflare-nginx
           Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:31:59 GMT
           Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
           Connection: keep-alive
           Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie,User-Agent
           Expires: Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:31:59 GMT
           Set-Cookie: __cfduid=de8b7126ad3841cd0da33c69651231c901344954719; expires=Mon, 23-Dec-2019 23:50:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.domain.com

   When these cookies and headers are sent to our CDN Network, it causes a conflict that prevents us from properly caching your static assets. That results in a very low cache hit percentage, along with an increased number of requests being sent to CloudFlare, which will negatively affect the load speed of your website.

   Scheme
   

• Solution
  We have implemented a new option within the Control Panel, which ignores the cookie's existence on the requested files. So after the CDN pulls the file from the origin, it will ignore the cookie and cache the file.
  This option is available within the Settings tab after you go to Manage Zone. Select the box next to Strip All Cookies and then select Update:
  

The Second Conflict

CloudFlare automatically utilizes a load balancer, which dynamically changes the IP address of your website. Usually, this is not an issue, however since our system depends on matching the IP address of the origin website with the FQDN/domain/URL, it will cause a conflict which will result into our servers unable to fetch and cache your static contents, generating a 502 Bad Gateway error.

Scheme

• Solution
  In the past, we used Pull Zone 2.0, which utilized the Apache Traffic Server to overcome the dynamic IP problem caused by CloudFlare, Amazon AWS, and other load balancing techniques. Apache Traffic Server had its problems, and lacked support for GZip compression. So we re-invented the Pull Zone to add an option for dynamic IP resolution, which is enabled by default when a zone is created. If you have already defined the Origin IP, you can uncheck Origin IP Resolution within your zone's settings and then dynamic IP resolution will be enabled for that zone. Also, you can contact us at support@maxcdn.com so we can make sure that dynamic IP resolution is definitely enabled for your zone.

As always, If you have any questions or concerns about any of the topics mentioned in this article, please feel free to reach out to support - we are available 24/7 by chat or email.