Cloudflare is one of the most famous tools that works as a reverse proxy between a visitor of the website and the hosting provider of the Cloudflare customer. It protects websites and makes them stay online in case of a DDoS attack. This means Cloudflare applies rules and manages the traffic flow of your website so that your backend server can operate.
However, like any other tool, Cloudflare also has random errors and bugs or even user mistakes. In this article, we’re going to discuss everything about Cloudflare error 1015, why it happens, and how you can fix it.
What is Cloudflare Error 1015?
Cloudflare error 1015 means, the website you are trying to access is rate-limiting your activity. It means Cloudflare blocked the connection of the rate-limited device temporarily.
A constant action can often trigger this error on a protected website and stop you from accessing the site for a certain period. In that case, a visitor can’t do anything to access the website until the error times out.
The error can also occur due to a wider issue, such as misconfigurations of Cloudflare or a common problem with Cloudflare itself.
How to Fix Cloudflare Error 1015?
Following are the solutions that you can try to fix error 1015
Slow Down Users Activity
The first and foremost thing to solve this error is to slow down the users activity. This error mainly occurs when a user performs too many actions in a short period.
When you access a site, each action requires a portion of that website’s resources. The website can crash or slow down because of unorganized traffic. Cloudflare rate-limiting recognizes and reduces the excessive request rate of the domain and helps to bypass these slowdowns.
You should need to configure your server to control regular traffic and activity so that high numbers of requests don’t block your website or app.
Hence, if you find this error while accessing a website, stop communicating with it temporarily and try again to access the site later. Although slowing down users’ activity on your website is a temporary solution that you can try while improving the firewall rules and Cloudflare rate-limiting configuration.
Disable Rate Limiting
In case you’re facing lots of Cloudflare 1015 errors on your website, disable the rate limit rules and open your domain from all traffic using any allowed IP address.
But you need to remember that this might expose your website and leaves you open to crashes and slowdowns caused by DDoS attacks or high-volume requests.
You can use this solution at the beginning to boost your Cloudflare rate-limiting configuration.
Delete Old Rate Limiting Configurations
If the error 1015 is still occurring even after disabling the rate limit, you need to delete your old rate-limiting configurations. In some cases, your rate limit rules can continue to work after disabling the rate-limiting features. In that case, delete all the rate-limiting rules and disable them again.
Increase your Rate Limiting Threshold
A very low limit can be responsible for the Cloudflare error 1015.
You can use the site owner settings to limit the number of page requests from an IP address within a given period. Most of the time users think that every pageview on the website is like one request.
However, it’s not correct. An individual pageview could feed 50 or more requests to the server just within a few seconds. Especially if a reverse proxy is being used or the visitor has removed the cache.
Therefore, if you’ve set a low rate limiting threshold on your website, increase the limit in your account settings or disable the rate limit.
Check Rate Limits Time Restrictions
If you set a rate-limit rule to block an IP address for sending several requests within 10 seconds, It can lead to unnecessary lockouts of your site. According to Cloudflare support experts, you can set your account’s rate limiting rules from 10 seconds to more.
So, check that the Cloudflare rate limit time restrictions of your settings are enough high to permit normal volume from every visitor to your site at the same time. Otherwise, the visitors will see more Cloudflare 1015 errors.
Increase your Bandwidth
If you’re getting the error 1015 message frequently in response to traffic or expecting your application to suffer this error, contact Cloudflare support to increase your Bandwidth limit.
Optimize Your Website
Another common reason for this error is a poorly optimized website. Your years may report various issues like,
- Slow page loading.
- Getting a refreshed article and posts on your website.
- They are clearing their cache and cookies every time while accessing a given URL.
If you’re receiving these types of complaints, you should make sure every part of your website is working properly and serving proper cache and cookies information to the visitor’s browser.
Once you optimize your website properly, it’ll help to reduce the high volume of requests and the possibility of error 1015.
Contact Cloudflare Support Community
If these solutions don’t help to solve the issue, contact the Cloudflare support community for help. Cloudflare provides multiple support articles and its support community is always active to solve your problem via live phone or email. You can even explain your problem on the Cloudflare community forum to check if someone else experienced the same problem.
