[Plugin: Online Backup for WordPress] CloudFlare is blocking retrievals (backups)

  • Alvaro Degives-Mas

    (@nv1962)


    12 years, 3 months ago

    I’m using the CloudFlare service (there’s a plugin for that, and it’s supported by W3 Total Cache too) which is in essence a reverse proxy that intercepts requests for the domain (at DNS level) and then, after scrutinizing the originating IP and request, passes on to / from the real webhost. It’s a fundamental security thing (and as a bonus you get some quasi-CDN caching benefits) and it’s serving me very, very well.

    However, since Online Backup for WP picks up the backup packages, that is very likely why the online backups (both manual and scheduled) are consistently failing, with the following error message:

    The backup failed: The server attempted to retrieve the data, but received junk from your blog. This can happen if your blog is not accessible over the internet. Otherwise, you may have a third-party plugin installed that is changing the backup data as the server tries to receive it. Please contact support if this is the case so we may improve compatibility.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wponlinebackup/

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • erick_paper

    (@erick_paper)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    I used CloudFlare for a while. It’s fine for simple toy sites. Their CDN sucks, their captcha will catch even you yourself after some time apart from perfectly okay visitors (and this is at a “Low” setting), their support is idiotic with non-technical people writing back idiotic ideas to always show them a traceroute, if you use a CDN with a CNAME then their DNS screws it up….and so on. Short story, I disabled it. The small benefit is not worth the headaches.

    Get a proper CDN for speed (CloudFront, or the thousands of others like MaxCDN or CacheFly) and for security consider mod_security rules, which are now quite savvy and come in easy to download formats.

    The best speed gain you’re going to get is not via CloudFlare or even a CDN. It’ll be via Nginx running your static files.

    Btw, CloudFlare in front of my Nginx site makes the throughput about 10 times slower. Yep, 1000% slower. Because they cannot cache static HTML files. Reason when asked? “Because Html files contain sensitive data”. That moronic answer aside, they told me to send traceroute again.

    Thread Starter Alvaro Degives-Mas

    (@nv1962)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    Well thanks for that but my query wasn’t really about CloudFlare’s quasi-CDN (I did say “quasi-CDN” right?) I asked about the interoperability of the Online Backup for WordPress plugin and the CloudFlare service. Their quasi-CDN is just a fringe benefit.

    Plain English version: take your gripes about CF to them or in a more appropriate topic.

    Plugin Author Online Backup

    (@driskell)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    Hi Álvaro,

    Does this service cache the search page for WordPress?
    Or does it pass requests for URLs containing ?s=searchstring directly to WordPress?
    When we collect backup packages we go through the search page as for the majority of services like this they do not cache dynamic pages such as the search page.

    Regards,

    Jason.

    Thread Starter Alvaro Degives-Mas

    (@nv1962)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    Hi Jason, no – those shouldn’t be cached by CF. And just in case you ask: I already had switched off the W3 Total Cache search results, so it’s not cached there, either.

    Plugin Author Online Backup

    (@driskell)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    Hi Alvaro,

    Could you provide a list of plugins you are using?
    So we can check them and see if any are interfering.

    You can email to support “at” backup-technology “dot” co “dot” uk if you don’t want to post it.

    Regards,

    Jason.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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