What should I do if I'm expecting a surge or spike in traffic?

If you are expecting a surge in traffic to your website, here are some steps that you should take:

1. Contact your hosting provider first. Even if CloudFlare helps offset a lot of the load to your site via caching and filtering of requests, your hosting provider may still have limits in place for your actual hosting plan.

2. Extend CloudFlare's caching abilities to cache more of your content through Advanced Caching and Edge Caching with Page Rules. Since CloudFlare only caches static content by default with our CDN, you can extend our caching by creating Page Rules.

3. If you do not want or need traffic from certain IPs or regions, please block them in your Threat Control panel. Blocking by IP or IP ranges will fully block visitors from accessing your site, whereas blocking by country will challenge all visitors from that region with a captcha (humans can still enter the site by passing the captcha).

4. Make sure that you are not throttling requests from CloudFlare's IP addresses. Since we become a reverse proxy for your site when you signup for CloudFlare, all connections will now come from CloudFlare IPs and restricting our IPs can cause issues for visitors trying to access your site.

5. We strongly recommend installing mod_cloudflare to restore original visitor IP back to your server logs. Similar to the situation mentioned in #4 above, our IPs are also going to show in your logs without a modification to correct the visitor IP.

Advanced Tips:

-Domains on a paid CloudFlare plan can customize the CloudFlare error pages.

-Domains on a paid CloudFlare plan have more Page Rules than a domain on a free account.

-We generally recommend turning CloudFlare off in the admin section of your site with a Page Rule. Some optional performance features and apps may inadvertently break some functions in the admin section of your site.