I used CloudFlare as a CDN about 6 months ago, and stopped after 5 days for similar reasons. Mainly it wasn't a speed improvement, and adsense CPC went into the toilet.

For what's it worth I got the largest debit I've ever seen for Invalid Traffic as well yesterday, January 28th...but I don't use CloudFlare. Used to use CF but stopped when upgraded to a better Host. Anyway, it could be related or maybe not, could just be that AdSense decided to issue debits on 1/28 and they were larger than usual.

Anyway, it could be related or maybe not, could just be that AdSense decided to issue debits on 1/28 and they were larger than usual.

I don't think so, this debit is huge and 50% of my daily Adsense income. This never happened before.
Also there was a higher than usual debit on the 27th. That's when I did a test run of about an hour with CloudFlare.

I use CloufFlare as a CDN (serving images, CSS only from a cdn.* subdomain). All the main content still comes from my main domain.

I did try Cloudflare in the main domain for a while though and because of our users' profile (location, etc) it didn't make sense continue using it. Also because I was seeing some errors that don't happen when served from our servers.

As a CDN, for $20 a month with SSL support it's a great deal. It does alleviate some load in our servers by reducing the number of images, css we serve directly.

Even when using Cloudflare in the main site (for a couple of months) I didn't notice any "invalid traffic" though.

I tried it for a month. Got rid of it because the performance improvement wasn't enough to justify the cost, but I didn't see any issues with AdSense during that time.

Unless you need SSL, then the free service is pretty good for everything else - use it as a free CDN and you save in traffic.

If you need SSL proxying then $20 a month for PRO is not bad. The $200 a month for enterprise is too much for small businesses/websites, but it can be good for some larger companies.

As I said, still use it for the CDN on my domain. I used DynDNS and MaxCDN before but Cloudflare came with a closer node to our main readers, so switched. Also MaxCDN doesn't support SSL (for cheap).

"1. According to Google Analytics my site speed didn't improve!
2. According to my Adsense account there was $*** invalid traffic. More than 50% of my Adsense income vanished because Google thinks it was invalid traffic. "

The only feature that we have that might impact AdSense is Rocket Loader. Did you have it turned on?

""1. According to Google Analytics my site speed didn't improve!"
Unless I am mistaken, the information they present is averaged out. Did you try testing your site with something like Pingdom or Webpagetest.org?

If you had an issue, however, it is much easier for us to investigate with an actual support ticket with the domain.

If you really want to know what's your page speed load, get the free Torbit account.

Expecting to improve your site speed with a free account is silly. Having been a web host, I can't imagine they're giving free customers the premium servers unless all accounts run across the same cloud servers, which if that's the case means even the paid accounts aren't any better.

Besides, AdSense doesn't load until after your page renders so someone with a slower computer (smartphone, tablet, old desktop PC like those still clinging to sluggish old XP machines) will have an even slower load time based on the rendering speed of their browser, possibly factor 3G into that mess, so the speed is all relative. Also consider that no matter how fast your servers are, if someone is loading pages over a 3G network, it just takes as long as it takes.


For those that don't know, Google has some page speed testing browser add-ons and mod_pagespeed for Apache and some other cool tools:
[developers.google.com...]

Also, sites on dedicated hosting servers can suffer from the default 10mbps NIC cards if they don't upgrade to 100mps NIC cards like I do on my servers which makes a HUGE difference.

...old desktop PC like those still clinging to sluggish old XP machines

This is why I never stopped using Windows 98...second addition of coarse...I'm no idiot. :)