ABOUT CLOUDFLARE
Cloudflare is a web performance and security company offering products including Cloudflare content delivery networks (CDN), Cloudflare DNS, Analytics, DDoS Mitigation and more.
Cloudflare’s customers include Hubspot, Zendesk, and Shopify.
ISSUES WITH Cloudflare in China
Two primary challenges:
Compatibility Issues
Western CDNs vs. China CDNs in China
CDNs perform a variety of functions, the most traditional being accelerating the "delivery of content".
The primary reason sites don’t ‘work’ in China is due to compatibility issues, which CDNs are unable to fully address.
Compatibility
A website or web page typically comprises of ~100 components called resources. This includes both visible components like images, Facebook-like widgets, Google Maps or ‘behind the scenes’ components like JavaScript.
Some of these resources are blocked in China, causing loading times to be affected as a whole, while other resources load slowly if at all because the server/network is too slow.
Speed & Infrastructure
Western CDNs and China CDNs perform differently in China. Reference Cedexis’ CDNs comparison China Report.