I used to use cloudflare because it was free with my hosting but now I'm on my own server. I don't use any caching now. There really isn't much to be cached anyways.

I'm having a meh experience with CF I mostly use it for the Browser <-> CF SSL layer, but honestly it seems to be somewhat slower than not having it at all. I might end up paying the $20/mo for business or whatever to see if there is a noticeable speed difference when you throw money at it.

It didn't really seem to be any different having it on or off to be honest. Again, there really isn't much to be cached here. Very few images and the jscript is pretty condensed. It was the free version after all. Maybe the business version is better.

I'm thinking more along the lines of full-page caching, where CF stores all the HTML upfront at their edge nodes across the world, and just spits it out before it even hits your app server for it.