First off, let me say that I love CloudFlare… and coming from me, that probably means something because there aren’t a lot of third party services that I think are great. But CloudFlare is one of those.

That being said, I still have a list of things I wish CloudFlare did (or did differently):

• Have a “failover host” option for individual DNS records.  For example route to host X, but if host X is down, route to host Y.  Yes, I know you can do DNS management with the CloudFlare API, and I built a system that monitors servers and switches them if needed via DNS API.  Just would be simpler if we had a “failover host” option.
• Allow wildcard domain records to route through CloudFlare.  This would be way more convenient.
• Make the Authy two-factor code last longer (like 30 days for that computer?).  It’s obnoxious that you have to generate a new two-factor code while being on the same computer every other day.
• Geotargeting granularity.  It would be nice if CloudFlare could geotarget more than the country… like long/lat/city level would be nice.
• WebSockets support.  Yes, I know it supports WebSockets for Enterprise users… and while I’m on a paid plan, I’m not on the Enterprise tier.  Update: from the comments on this blog post, it looks like it might be coming.  Yay!
• Prepayment.  For paid plans, I don’t know what happens if your monthly payment doesn’t go through for some reason, but I don’t want to find out. It would be nice if you could just be like, “I want to prepay for the next year so there’s no service interruption”.
• Use HTTP/2 To Origin.  Cloudflare doesn’t use SPDY or HTTP/2 to the origin server even when available. See: this tweet
• Sync Data Centers.  Cloudflare data center caching is great, but as more and more data centers come online, the benefit diminishes. Right now there are 74 Cloudflare data centers, which means a resource is requested 74 times (once per data center) for caching.
• Email routing.  It would be nice if you didn’t have to expose your server’s true IP addresses when sending an email (or just from your SPF records in your DNS).  Having a service that lets your mail servers relay email through and erase the originating IP from the email header in the process would be super fantastic.  Probably would be problematic because of potential spam implications, but it sure would be nice to have truly hidden server IPs without needing to get separate servers in a separate location for email.

CloudFlare is super rad and if you own a website without using it (even their free plan), you are doing it wrong.  🙂