poVoq While using Cloudflare might be good for website speed (as any CDN basically)
And only sometimes, Cloudflare is not a good CDN, it's known to have bad routing, it sometimes slows down your website a lot. I've had this problem for months on my forum, Cloudflare routed traffic from Italy to the USA or to Australia for no reason.
Moreover, L7 DDoS protection is a bit of a joke, it doesn't handle L7 attacks unless you get tens of thousands of requests per second, it's pretty useless. You have to configure firewall rules by hand and most of the time enable them manually when you're under attack. Under attack mode is always bypassed nowadays.
Apart from this, however, I agree that using a CDN is helpful to protect from L4 attacks and to improve performance when the hosting provider doesn't have good connectivity. For example, if you use some small hosting it's likely that some random ISP doesn't have a good way to reach it (it depends on a lot of things), while if you use OVH/Hetzner/etc. you're likely to not have these problems. It also depends on where your server is located and where your users are located.
Also, you need to consider that a forum contains primarily dynamic content, and the fact that Flarum is a single page application makes CDN caching useful only on the first page load. It might improve the response time for the reasons above, but caching shouldn't play much of a role.
So be careful to use Cloudflare with lower plans, it might seem good because it's free but it's not always the best solution. My recommendation is to not use it just because everyone's doing it, think about it.
