How to set up ssl cloudflare? What are the alternatives of this service for the Russian audience?

Question

cloudflare

I want to get flexible ssl from cloudflare, I understand how it works (nothing is encrypted from me to cloudflare, and this free ssl is used from cloudflare to the client

) ssl, but when switching to the https version, nothing is loaded (error - the site does not allow you to establish a connection.)

I don’t understand how to do this - somewhere it’s written that it’s enough just to select CRYPTO->ssl=flexible in the settings, somewhere they write that You also need to use a self-signed certificate on your server for everything to work.

Please write how to solve this issue.
Also, as I understand it, using this service, you can significantly speed up site loading and reduce the load on your server by caching content (that is, as I understand it, this service can be used for caching similarly to varnish installed on your own server).
Please tell us about how you can speed up page loading and reduce the load on your own server using cloudflare, and is it recommended (how effective is it) to use varnish or native nginx caching on your server in conjunction with this service?

UPD: As I understand cloudflare will have a large ping for Russian users, please advise a CDN service with the same capabilities (flexible ssl, that is, ssl is not on your server, but encryption from the CDN service to the client), optimal for Russia and the CIS countries. Free as well as paid counterparts.

Answer 1

Enable flexible SSL (does not require a certificate to be installed on the server itself):
Enable caching for a day (pages will be served from a cache that is updated once a day):
Enable minification of HTML, CSS and JS (speeds up page loading):
To nginx account: to cloudflare already has nginx configured for caching. No need to cache on your server. Otherwise, there will be problems during development, you will have to turn off the cache here and there. On cloudflare, you can enable development mode to disable the cache during development (you can see this option in the second screenshot).
As for Varnish: I haven’t dealt with it, so I can be wrong, but in my opinion it is used when partial caching of dynamic pages is needed. That is, for example, the site header is dynamic, and the rest is from the cache.
In general, the effective use of the cache is a question for the developer rather than the admin.

Answer 2

Lol, very stupid, a non-external ip was used, now I'll see how to set up an external ip in vmware and check if it should work

Answer 3

To install an SSL site to them, it seems that you need a PRO tariff.