This review is written after about one month of using the Brother HL-3140CW laser printer.

This is the third laser printer (second colour one) I’ve owned in the past 15 or 16 years (along with a number of inkjet printers and dot matrix printers before that).

Summary

The Brother HL-3140CW is a very fast printer with excellent print quality. I am very pleased with it and easily recommend it.

Print Speed

The printer is specified as printing 18 pages per minute in both colour and black and white. It is definitely very close to its advertised print speed.

If you are printing a lot of single page documents, then the print speed will be slower, but if you are printing a long document, the speed comes very close to 18 pages per minute.

Printing a 54 page (27 sheets double sided) document takes under 5 minutes and this includes the time needed to feed the paper back into the printer and hit continue.

Print Quality

The print quality is excellent. Text is nice and crisp and images are very nice.

Because this is a laser printer, image quality will not be as good as an inkjet on photographic paper, but it is still more than suitable if you were publishing a newsletter or zine with pictures in it. The image quality is far superior than an inkjet on plain paper (and there is no paper wrinkling or curling).

Below are three print samples (scanned at 1200 dpi) printed at (1) 600 dpi, (2) 2400 dpi and (3) 600 dpi with toner saver mode on (the font used is Calibri @ 11pt):

There is no obvious difference between 600 and 2400 dpi mode for text. In toner saving mode, the printout is a little lighter, but not significantly so and is perfectly acceptable and readable for normal documents.

The Brother HL-3140CW combines the print drum with the toner cartridge (when you change the toner, you only replace the toner portion of the combined unit – you can read instructions on doing this here), so the actual drum unit is quite small – about 3cm in diameter. This gives the drum a circumference (length) of about 9.5cm, which means that there is the possibility of a horizontal printing artefact appearing about every 9.5cm:

If you look very carefully, you can see the artefact running through the middle of the print sample above. To be honest, it is not very noticeable unless (1) you are looking for it and (2) you know where to look. I have not noticed it in any text documents.

Below are 100% crops taken from the same place (more or less) on the original and printed copies. The printed images were scanned in at 600 dpi:

Once again, I point out that the scanned images look worse than the actual images in your hand.

Wireless Setup

If you have a one-touch wireless router, then setup should be as easy as pressing a button. Unfortunately, my router is not one of the one-touch types, so I had to connect the printer to my computer to set it up for wireless operation. I don’t remember the details of it, but I believe the instructions were simple enough and straightforward enough that I had no problem.

You will require a USB cable to connect the printer to your computer. This is not provided with the printer. The USB cable needs a regular USB connector on one end and a square connector on the other (also known as Type A and Type B):

Problems

I haven’t had any problems with the printer aside from two paper jams.

The paper jams occurred when I was doing some double sided printing. To call it a paper jam seems harsh because all I needed to do to fix it was (1) pull the paper tray out, (2) flip through the paper, (3) reinsert the tray and continue printing.

I suspect the paper jam occurred because I hadn’t properly flipped through the pages before putting them back for printing on the other side.

Toner Yield

The toner cartridges are specified to yield 2500 pages (according to the ISO 19798 standard). Your yield will vary depending on how much content (toner used) you have per page. Clearly, printing double spaced text will result in more pages printed than if you are printing lots of full page images.

The printer comes with four starter cartridges (rated at 1000 pages). I finished my black toner after about 900 pages (mind you, I tend to print more content per page than the ISO test pages – and I did print out quite a few images), so this was not surprising.

Conclusion

A great printer with excellent quality output that I am very happy with and highly recommend.

The wireless option is awesome, because now people can print directly from their own computer without having to go through mine first.

The post Brother HL-3140CW Laser Printer – a Review appeared first on Complete, Concrete, Concise.

Photon works by using wordpress.com to cache and serve up images from your site.

Since I am always looking for ways to reduce my bandwidth (and speed up performance), I enabled it.

I have observed a reduction in the bandwidth:

The 20^th, 21^st, and 22^nd averaged about 3% fewer page hits than on the 25^th – but it is obvious that (with Photon enabled) I used less bandwidth on the 25^th .

The 23^rd and 24^th are the weekend, so there is always a drop in traffic. I suspect the spike seen on the 24^th is related to enabling Photon.

Based on very limited data, Photon appears to be working well and is saving me some bandwidth. It does not require me to change anything about my site (always a serious bonus).

The post WordPress – Preliminary Impressions of Photon in JetPack appeared first on Complete, Concrete, Concise.

Given that the price was unbelievable, I bought one.

Reasons for Buying

There were two reasons I bought it:

1) The whole idea of a tablet is cool. I watch my kids using their iPods as portable total connectivity devices and would like the same – though bigger and not so squinty eyed for my aging eyes. Besides, there are many times when it simply doesn’t make sense or is inconvenient to have to use the computer or laptop (why can’t I read PDF files anywhere / everywhere? Check on the weather? See what movies are playing?).

2) Most importantly, it has the same specs as the MK802 (basically a computer on a USB stick). The MK802 has not turned out to be as good as I hoped and it is a bit inconvenient to use since the only HDMI display I have is the TV in the basement. I was hoping that the Lazer 7″ would be a useful double for the MK802 (with the added bonus of having a display).

The Specs

• Allwinner A10 CPU running at 1GHz
• 1 GB RAM
• 4 GB Flash memory
• 7″ display
• 800 x 480 resolution
• capacitive touch screen
• WiFi
• HDMI output
• 1.3 megapixel camera (front facing, located in corner)
• Android 4.0.3 preinstalled

I was concerned about the display resolution because I thought it a little on the low side. (The 10″ version has exactly the same specs, except the display has a resolution of 1024×600 – but I couldn’t justify shelling out an extra €70 for a 3″ larger display and slightly increased resolution.

Display Performance

The display is fine for graphical applications (like playing Angry Birds), but, as I feared, has limitations when it comes to reading text.

Reading a PDF document in portrait mode is just not possible.

Reading a PDF document landscape mode is possible and if this was the only limitation of the device, then I would be fine with it.

Touch Screen Performance

The display was completely responsive to my touches and gestures. The only thing I noted was that it was perhaps a little too responsive – hovering my finger just above the display (i.e. almost touching it) would sometimes cause it to respond as though I had double tapped it (clearly, I shouldn’t be hovering my finger so close to the display).

There was no sense of sluggishness or unresponsiveness in the touch screen.

Application Performance

Applications (with the exception of anything needing the Internet) run fine. There is no sense that they are starved of CPU power (this is even true of the MK802 on which I play Angry Birds at 1920x1080i @ 60hz with no sense of the processor struggling under the load).

WiFi / Internet Performance

This is the Achilles heel of the Lazer 7″ Tablet (and the MK802 and, even the UG802) – for some reason, the networking performance is abysmal.

It took over 10 minutes to start playing the following 2 minute, 12 second video. This sluggish behaviour is identical on the MK802 and the UG802 (although, the UG802 does seem to perform noticeably better).

I don’t know what the problem is:

• Is Android’s WiFi / Network performance lousy?
• Is the problem the way the WiFi has been implemented?
• Does the problem lie in AllWinner’s version of Android?
• Is it poor Flash memory write speeds?
• Is the entire video being buffered before being played?
• etc, etc, etc

Whatever the problem is, it makes the Lazer 7″ Tablet useless as an always connected to the Internet device.

Even forgoing the problem with Youtube, just browsing around for information is a pain.

On the iPod, the video starts playing about 15 seconds; if I search for things, the response is much faster.

Conclusion

Unless you want to use the tablet just for playing pre-installed games or maybe watching pre-loaded videos, I can’t recommend it for two reasons:

1. the display resolution effectively rules out using text on it (unless you are in landscape mode)
2. the WiFi / Network performance is outrageously bad – to the point that it is effectively unusable as a networked device (this also applies to the MK802 and UG802)

The post Review of the Lazer 7" (MID7109) Tablet appeared first on Complete, Concrete, Concise.

Canonical released version 12.10 of Ubuntu OS on October 18, 2012.

My opinions are based on final release downloaded and installed with updates on October 18, 2012.

Short Recommendation

No.

Longer Recommendation

Wait a few weeks.

Detailed Recommendation

Canonical (the developers of Ubuntu) release a new version of Ubuntu every six months and support those releases for 18 months.

Every two years, Ubuntu releases a Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu. Those releases are supported for five years.

Ubuntu 12.04 is the latest LTS version of Ubuntu and the version I recommend. Ubuntu 12.10 is a short term release.

Why have releases every six months with short term support?

By releasing a new version of Ubuntu every 6 months, Canonical can incrementally add features to the OS. Sometimes, the features are only partially implemented or of limited use. A good example is Unity in Ubuntu 11.10 – only the Dash and some lenses were functional, the HUD (which makes Unity far more useful) was not present until Ubuntu 12.04.

It also allows them to get more feedback from users and see how the new features are working out.

Interim releases can also add support for new hardware devices that were not previously available.

You Need a 3D Hardware Accelerated Graphics Card

With Ubuntu 11.10 and Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical developed both a 2D and 3D version of the Unity interface. This is a lot of effort to maintain.

With Ubuntu 12.10, they removed the 2D version of Unity. Before jumping for joy that Unity is gone from Ubuntu, I should point out that Unity 3D is still there AND it is the only desktop (unless you install something else). Ubuntu 12.10 is now using LLVM Pipe to render 3D graphics on the CPU (if no suitable 3D accelerated graphics card is found).

This makes Ubuntu 12.10 a poor choice for older systems because (1) graphics cards pre-2007 (or so) are unlikely to have the necessary 3D hardware support (this is a GNOME issue, not Ubuntu), (2) older CPUs are not as powerful as modern ones, so tasking them to handle the 3D graphics will slow your system even more.

You will receive a warning when upgrading that your graphics card is not powerful enough:

You get Advertising from Amazon when using Dash

By default, the Dash interface (what you use to search your computer for programs or files) now includes advertising from Amazon.

This has generated a great deal of controversy. Fortunately, it is easy to turn off by going to your privacy settings:

Unity is a work in progress and it seems to be trying to give a uniform computer experience. I am not crazy about having advertising directly on my desktop – maybe it will urn out to be a good thing, but I am not holding my breath.

Doesn’t Work Properly with VirtualBox Versions Prior to 4.2

This may not be a big issue for some (most?) users, but I was initially running Ubuntu in VirtualBox 4.1.22. The VirtualBox Guest Additions for enabling advanced display features (changing display resolution and 3D hardware acceleration) was not working. VirtualBox versions prior to 4.2.2 don’t support X Server version 1.13 (which is what Ubuntu 12.10 – and other newer Linux distros – use).

The solution is to upgrade to the latest version of VirtualBox (currently 4.2.2 as of 19-Oct-2012). (I find it strange that VirtualBox did not notify me that a new version was available after 4.1.22.)

Unfortunately, this will not enable 3D harware acceleration (which is still broken in VirtualBox 4.2.2).

Compiz Crashes

Compiz is responsible for handling the underlying graphical display. This problem may be related to using LLVM Pipe instead of 3D hardware acceleration on a graphics card.

This crash is happening less frequently with the release version of Ubuntu 12.10 than with the Beta 2 release, but even once is still too frequent.

This error occurs whether you are using 3D hardware acceleration or LLVM Pipe.

Mysterious Internal Errors

Error Reporting Errors

Odd Behavior at the Login Screen

This will only affect people who have several desktop environments installed.

If you have several desktop environments installed, the updated login page has a bug that makes it impossible to select a desktop environment if the options scroll off the display (although, hitting the Tab key and then the Enter key seemed to work to accept the selection)

In this case, the selection arrow (located on the bottom and right hand side of the selection menu) is off screen and not at all accessible:

Summary

Like my initial impressions of Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.10 has that “not quite ready for prime time” feel about it (because of the Compiz instability and the funky login screen problem).

Of course, Ubuntu 12.10 is an interim release and should not be looked at as a long term OS solution, so, if things aren’t quite right then it isn’t really an issue – eventually, they will be addressed.

Unless you absolutely have to have the latest version, I would recommend sticking with Ubuntu 12.04.

Even if you have to have the latest version, I would still recommend sticking with Ubuntu 12.04 for a few more weeks to give Ubuntu a chance to iron out any issues that might still be lurking in 12.10.

The post Ubuntu 12.10 – Should you Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10? appeared first on Complete, Concrete, Concise.

UPDATED 11-May-2012

I have discovered that the problem with Software Updates and Add/Remove Software noted below was caused by VirtualBox Guest Additions not being correctly installed. This happened because

1. the Linux kernel header files are not installed,
2. GCC (a compiler) is not installed,
3. make (a tool for GCC) is not installed.

Installing gcc and make was not a problem. Installing the Linux kernel header files was. For some reason, kernel-devel-3.1.0-7.fc16.i686.PAE is not available (I am sure if I hunt around some more, I will find it, but that is beside the point, I am interested in install, test, use not install and fiddle around until I get some semblance of a usable system.

Notwithstanding the problems it has with VirtualBox Guest Additions, I still find it hard to like or recommend Fedora 16:

(1) The Software and Add/Remove Software applications are very slow. Clearly, it is getting info off the network, but I found it to be even slower than Ubuntu Software Center

(2) It has a borderless white menu scheme, which looks nice on a dark background:

but gets completely washed out when overlaying a white themed application (like the terminal):

(3) It insists on popping up unnecessary warnings to users. This is from the Add/Remove Software application when you click on Package Collections:

A better solution would be to either (1) refresh the cache without notifying the user, or (2) display a Yes / No dialog with the question: “The cache is invalid, would you like to refresh it?” (even that is too much information to the user). It should be option (1) and after 2 or 3 failures, then it should notify the user that something is wrong.

This is from the Add/Remove Software application when trying to install gcc (a compiler collection):

This is too much geek information for the average user. I think that software packages managed by Fedora should be automatically instead of asking the user if they trust it.

Background

I’ve played with Linux for almost 20 years. My first experience was trying to compile it, in the early 90s, from sources (gotten off a CUG CD?), but Turbo C wasn’t able to compile it.

By the mid-90s, I was playing with compiled distributables. While they were interesting and often had some neat features, I never considered them ready for the desktop.

Ubuntu 11.04 was the first Linux distro I thought just worked out-of-the-box and could be deemed ready for the desktop. When Ubuntu 11.10 seemed to take a step backwards I began trying out other Linux distros (to their credit, Ubuntu did quickly recover their mistep).

When I tried Fedora 15 in November 2011, it was a complete failure – it would not even install. It would go through the whole installation procedure only to lock up at the end.

Fedora 16 did install.

The Setup

I installed Fedora in a VirtualBox (4.1.12r77218) system. The virtual machine was configured to have 1 cpu, 1024Mb memory, 128Mb video memory (3D acceleration enabled), 8Gb hard drive.

I installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions.

Installation

Unlike Fedora 15, Fedora 16 did install, although the initial messages displayed when booting off the install DVD were not encouraging:

Installation was quick. This is probably because I downloaded the 3.7GB DVD image and it installed off the DVD without downloading files from the Internet.

While the installation procedure is not too complicated, it is certainly not as simple as Ubuntu’s or Linux Mint’s.

I chose the basic install (although I was tempted to install development tools as well).

First Boot

After installation, I rebooted the machine and was delighted to see it boot up with no problems.

The default background image is an underwater scene that is strongly reminiscent of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (one of my favourite books):

Problems

While it did boot up and various applications I tried worked, there are at least two applications that don’t work: Software Updates and Add/Remove Software.

This effectively means I can’t apply software updates (including security updates) to the system, nor can I install new software packages – effectively rendering the system useless.

When launched, both applications display the following warning:

Not the most user friendly message, but at least it suggest (to me) a course of action. I opened up a terminal and ran yum-complete-transaction as root:

It tells me there is one transaction that needs to finish:

As it runs, it displays page after page of warnings and errors:

Trying the recommended suggestion to run with the flag --skip-broken doesn’t help either.

Finally, I get the following notification (not consistently, when logging in):

Conclusion

From my experience, Fedora Linux is an extremely big disappointment because it just doesn’t work out of the box.

What makes it more disappointing is that it is based on the venerable Red Hat Linux – a distro I played around with in the 1990’s.

Of course, nowadays, Red Hat makes its money selling service and support to enterprises, not by giving away free copies of its Linux distribution.

Of all the Linux distros I’ve tried since 2011, Fedora Linux is the only one that doesn’t work. Period.

Other distros may have issues (not recognizing my WiFi adapter being most common), but at least they work.

The post Fedora 16 – First Impressions – Not Positive appeared first on Complete, Concrete, Concise.

After my laser printer died, I was in a scramble to buy a replacement printer so my daughter could get some homework printed out.

It was 7 years since my last printer purchase, so I wasn’t up to date on printers and didn’t have time to thoroughly research the market.

I have owned ink jet printers before, but have always preferred laser printers because (1) they are faster and (2) the cost of consumables is cheaper.

I bought the Epson SX130 because it was at a very attractive price and would meet my needs until I found a replacement laser printer.

Summary

The Epson SX130 is a low cost, ink jet printer and scanner combo that produces excellent quality prints and scans. Its cons are very slow print speed and high cost of operation.

Print Speed

The box says 30 pages per minute. That is not an exaggeration, it is an outright, boldfaced lie. The printer comes nowhere near 30 pages per minutes. Not even half that.

I get about 2 pages per minute printing black and white text on an A4 sheet (slightly narrower and longer than an 8½” x 11″ sheet). Even in “fast” mode the print speed is not noticeably faster.

Printing out a 10cmx15cm (4″x6″) photograph takes over 2 minutes.

Print Quality

The print quality is excellent, both text and photos / images.

There is a “fast” print mode, but I don’t see any noticeable difference in print speed. But there is a difference in print quality – images get banding, and text can sometimes be skewed. So I leave the print quality in normal mode.

Below, you can see a closeup (scanned at 1200 dpi) sample of print quality:

The top was from my laser printer, the middle using normal print mode on the Epson and the bottom using “fast” print mode on the Epson (I know, the fonts are different, sorry, but it doesn’t affect the whole point about quality).

The laser clearly gives the crispest print quality (it was a 600 dpi printer). The only difference I see between the normal print mode and fast print mode is that the letters are slightly coarser in fast print mode – but nothing to get excited over. The Epson gives very good quality text that, for normal reading, is indistinguishable from laser printer output.

Photographic prints (using photo paper) are excellent and I don’t see any appreciable difference from the prints I get from the photo shop. The images are sharp (assuming your photo was sharp) and the colours vibrant. I did not notice any banding.

Expensive to Print

The Epson SX130 uses the T1281, T1282, T1283, T1284 printer cartridges – one cartridge for each colour. Epson touts this as being cheaper because you only need to change the empty cartridge. Maybe this is true, but probably not much.

Each cartridge hold 3ml of pigment based ink. That’s not a lot.

I get between twenty four and thirty 10cm x 15cm (4″x6″) photo prints (this assumes you are not printing pictures of predominantly one colour).

I get about 100 pages of black and white text

These yields are not very much (especially not compared to my laser printer where I was getting over 1000 pages per cartridge).

Locked into Expensive Ink

Epson sells identically sized cartridges called T1291, T1292, T1293, T1294. These are exactly the same size as the T128x cartridges, except that they contain 10ml of ink instead of 3ml of ink. They are used by many other Epson printers. The T128x are branded as medium yield cartridges and the T129x as large yield cartridges.

They do not work in the Epson SX130. Since you bought their cheapest printer, Epson is going to force you to buy their lowest yielding cartridges. This is not some sort of compatibility problem between the T129x cartridges and the SX130. It is a deliberate decision by Epson to lock out use of those cartridges on the Epson SX130.

Designed to Use More Ink

In addition to forcing you to use the lowest yielding ink cartridges, Epson also selects print modes that encourage more use of ink (so you have to buy more expensive ink).

Since I mostly print text, I don’t care about colour. So I tick the Grayscale print option. I have to tick it every time I print – for some reason Epson doesn’t remember that setting. Note: You can get the sx130 to remember your print settings. See this addendum at the bottom of the article. If Grayscale is not ticked, then the printer will use all the colours for printing (even if the text is only black and white) – thus slowly using up the other cartridges.

Not only that, but if you happen to be running low on black ink, it will ask you if you want to enable printing with the other colours:

I am sure Epson would argue that this is all to improve quality of the printing – which I am sure it does – but I am sure it doesn’t hurt that it also causes you to use more ink and, consequently, buy more of their expensive ink.

Scanner

I have had no problem with the scanner, it works fine. I used it to scan the text images above and I find the quality fine.

Photo Copier

The Epson SX130 can also act as a photocopier. Place your document on the scanner, press either the black and white or colour copy button and it will scan and print your document for you.

This is very nice feature and does not require the printer to be hooked up to the computer.

I’ve used this feature several times and it is far easier than the old way I used to do it (which was to scan the document, fix it up in GIMP, and then print it out).

Conclusion

As an all-in-one printer / scanner / photocopier, the Epson SX130 is very easy to like.

It functions well and the output quality is excellent.

The use of pigment based inks means the photo quality and durability should be significantly better than those printed using dye based inks.

Where it fails, for me, is in the cost of consumables (the ink). Buying the set of four ink cartridges costs as much as the printer itself cost.

Epson deliberately locks out using the higher capacity T129x ink cartridges which should give you 3 times the yield for about 50% more cost (expressed another way, cost of ink would be about ½).

This is not a printer for someone who needs to print things. This is a printer for someone who needs to print or copy something in a pinch. Maybe your main printer in out-of-order, or you don’t have time to go to the library to copy something, or the photo store is closed and you just got to get that picture printed and sent to aunt Mae.

This is not a suitable printer for students or anyone who needs to print – the cost of operation is prohibitive.

The post Epson SX130 – a Review appeared first on Complete, Concrete, Concise.

This review reflects my experience with CloudFlare‘s free services applied to this website which was powered by WordPress 3.2.1 running on a shared webhost. It looks at the performance for the month of December 2011.

The Problem I was Looking to Fix

As this site has grown in popularity, it uses more bandwidth. In October 2011, this site served up 5.84GB of data. November 2011, I was heading towards 9GB of data served. Currently, this site is hosted on a shared hosting plan with “unlimited” bandwidth. Well, nothing is unlimited, and I was concerned that as I used up more bandwidth one of two things would happen: (1) performance would suffer – since this is running on a shared host, I have to share the server and bandwidth with all the other website running on this host and (2) the host might decide that I’m using too much bandwidth and would I like to consider upgrading to a (more expensive) plan that better meets my needs.

Possible Solutions

Move to a dedicated or virtual host

Dedicated hosting means I would have the server all to myself and (in theory) a direct connection to the Internet.

Virtual hosting means I would still be sharing a server with other websites, but fewer than on a shared host (on a shared host, there can be hundreds or thousands of other websites).

(1) Better server performance.

(2) Faster connection to the Internet.

(1) Increased cost.

(2) Have to move the website.

(3) No “unlimited” bandwidth. Many plans start with 1-4GB of monthly data transfer and charge for extra usage. More additional costs.

Move to some sort of cloud service

(1) Possibly better server performance.

(2) Possibly faster connection to the Internet.

(3) Likely distributed servers, so if one goes down, your site still stays up. The problem with a single server is if the server goes down or the Internet connection goes down, your site is offline. Moving your site into a “cloud” or some other distributed service means you are likely to get better uptime.

(1) Increased cost.

(2) Have to move the website.

(3) No “unlimited” bandwidth. Many plans start with 1-4GB of monthly data transfer and charge for extra usage. More additional costs. While some startup cloud services offer unlimited, because they are new, how long will they be in business? My current host provider has been around for a number of years, so I am not too worried about it going out of business.

Move images to an image server

My articles tend to use a lot of images. I could cut down on bandwidth by moving them to an image host – like flickr, or imageshack, or picassa, or similar services. This means I would leverage their servers to serve up my images.

(1) Reduced bandwidth. I would be using their bandwidth, not mine, to serve images.

(2) Probably improved performance. Their servers are far more likely than mine to be geared to serving up bandwidth hungry images.

(1) Images are now hosted somewhere else. Need to get another account (don’t we already have enough of those?).

(2) If I move my images somewhere else, I have to update ALL my articles to use the new links. Ugh.

(3) Many only offer limited service for free accounts. For example, at this time (January 2012) Flickr limits the amount of images you can upload to 300MB per month (ok, that’s quite generous, currently, I don’t approach that limit), thus requiring additional expense to upgrade to a better account.

(4) It doesn’t look very professional if you host to images located elsewhere.

(5) Blogging clients tend to assume you are hosting your images with your content, not somewhere else. This makes uploading and linking to images more of a hassle.

What CloudFlare Claims

http://www.cloudflare.com/

When I read what CloudFare offered, it was pretty much what I wanted (aside from sounding too good to be true).

(1) You get to keep your current webhost.

(2) It’s free (at least the basic service). Nothing better than being able to test drive something before deciding if it’s worth purchasing or upgrading to.

(3) Improved page load times.

(4) Reduced bandwidth.

(5) Improved website uptime.

(6) Improved security.

I was skeptical, but, (1) it was free and (2) all it required me to do was change my domain name server – if worse came to worse, I could always change it back and, at most, suffer 1 or 2 days down time with this experiment.

How I Installed CloudFlare’s Service

This site (at present) is running on WordPress. I installed the W3 Total Cache plugin and scrolled down to the section titled Network Performance & Security powered by CloudFlare (about 2/3 down the page):

This can be found on General Settings page of the Performance tab:

Click on the Sign up now for free link and create an account with CloudFlare. W3 Total Cache will have filled in some information for you. Once your account it set up, you give CloudFlare your website’s URL and it fills in some information for you.

The only thing I didn’t like about the CloudFlare setup was after the initial setup page, you get two pages about A records and CNAME records, which, for most users, is over their heads and should probably be hidden behind an Advanced Settings tab. I found no problem in accepting the default values.

CloudFlare will then give you new domain name servers that you will use to update the DNS information with your domain registrar.

Within 24-48 hours, your site will now be augmented with CloudFlare’s service (the actual time might be shorter, in my case, I noticed switch over after about 4 hours – the switch over time has nothing to do with CloudFlare and everything to do with how fast the DNS change you made propagates through the entire Internet).

Results

How does CloudFlare measure up on its promised results?

Get to Keep My Current Webhost

Yes. Trying out CloudFlare just means changing your domain’s DNS. Other than that, CloudFlare lets you keep your current host.

Improved Page Load Time

I didn’t notice any improvement. I installed W3 Total Cache a week before activating CloudFlare because I wanted to see how page load time differed between (1) out-of-the-box WordPress, (2) WordPress with W3 Total Cache and (3) WordPress with W3 Total Cache and CloudFlare.

W3 Total Cache did improve my page load times over the out-of-the-box WordPress experience. Adding CloudFlare to the mix didn’t change the performance. This shows that my webhost was already providing me with good bandwidth.

Reduced Bandwidth

This is what I was looking for and CloudFlare delivers.

In November 2011, my webhost served up 8.8GB of data for this site. In December 2011, my webhost served up 2.89GB of data for this site – despite serving 15% more pages in December than November. That works out to a 70% drop in bandwidth consumption on my server. Awesome!

Improved Uptime

Early in December, I had a problem with logging into my WordPress account and during the course of troubleshooting, I took the site offline.

I was delighted to discover that even though I had taken my site offline, CloudFlare continued to serve up my webpages – or, at least, the webpages it had cached. This means that even if my server goes down for some reason, CloudFlare will continue to serve up, at least, the most popular pages from its cache. Pages which are not in its cache, will not be served up.

This is an excellent bonus I was not looking for.

Since this site is about content, having improved content availability is significant.

If your server goes down and the page is not in CloudFlare’s cache, the following message is displayed (click for larger image):

Improved Security

This is hard to answer. I don’t think I was ever subject to attacks from malicious websites, so whether CloudFlare protects me from them is something I can’t say.

When you look at visitor stats from CloudFlare’s control panel, it shows the number of safe visitors and the number of threats blocked. Since I was not aware of these threats beforehand, I can’t comment on it.

If someone visits your site from a flagged IP, then CloudFlare will display them a challenge screen similar to this one (click for larger image):

Conclusion

I am delighted with CloudFlare. It does exactly what I needed it to do (reduce bandwidth usage on my host). The installation is simple. I didn’t need to make any changes to my website or hosting (aside from changing my name server). And it gave me the added bonus of improving my site’s (perceived) uptime (at least for popular pages) by continuing to serve up my content.

It does not affect the information delivered by JetPack Site Stats or Google’s Analytics. I continue to get information on where visitors come from, what keywords were used, etc. I was concerned that I might find all my traffic was coming from CloudFlare, but this is not the case. CloudFlare is completely transparent.

CloudFlare also provides its own site stats. One nice thing about them is that I can see the previous days stats hour by hour – which gives finer resolution that Site Stats’ or Analytics’ daily resolution. It also shows you the number of visitors from sites perceived as threats (red line). The image below shows yesterdays visits, hour by hour (click for larger image):

CloudFlare also tells you the last time search engines crawled your site (which means you don’t have to estimate it like this):

The only criticism I have of it is that they can make the sign up process easier by hiding pages 2 and 3 of the sign up process behind an “Advanced Settings” link or tab because most average users (1) will not understand it and (2) will use the defaults anyway.

CloudFlare can be found here.

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