Caching, even level 1 has always been a disaster for me.

[Morthawt]

DDOS protection is a useful purpose. Fast DNS is a useful purpose. Having certain files on my site be available via servers closer to the user is a useful purpose. But as I said I have always had this problem ever since I used SMF. I only started using cloudflare about 2 days ago.

[Kindred]

Cloudflare DDOS?  only for against script kiddies who have no idea what they are doing. Even with Cloudflare, your IP can be easily determined.

Files at a closer server?  What files?   Not most of the forum pages...  they can't get cached because they are dynamic...

anyway...   it seriously does sound like a server side configuration issue - since we KNOW the issue is not on the software side...

[Morthawt]

Server side, yes.. My point is WHAT could be doing it? That way I can look into it and try to fix the problem. Server side tells me nothing. I have tried to solve this myself, blind, many times. If someone can point me in the right direction maybe I will have a hope of fixing it.

[Kindred]

honestly, I have no idea....   I don't have a lot of knowledge with server configurations...  I deal with the software side of things.