Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Boston, offers a Akamai: a content delivery network (CDN).
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Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Cloudflare, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, provides DDoS and bot mitigation security for business domains, as well as a content delivery network (CDN) and web application firewall (WAF).
CloudFlare is much easier to use. It is much cheaper and from our experience, it works so much better. The support staff at CloudFlare has always been helpful and will get on the phone when we need help. Also, CloudFlare helped us get set up on their platform in about an hour …
CloudFlare and CloudFront are good for small sites where budgetary costs are the primary concern but Akamai Ion provides a new level of quality and performance.
I haven't had much experience with other CDNs and to be honest I haven't heard of many more other than Akamai which just goes to show which one is the most trusted and proves to be the best. There are others out there, such as CloudFlare, that claim to provide a similar service …
We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more …
I don't have any direct experience with any of the other CDNs, so it's hard to say. Like any solution out there, each service will have its pros and cons. Some will fit your business needs more than others. Akamai is amongst the best and meets our business needs.
CloudFlare is always innovating fast and adding new interesting solutions to the CDN, DNS, and DDoS problems that keep appearing as the internet grows and matures. Due to network effects, using CloudFlare is easier, faster, and more reliable than the competitors, and their …
Cloudflare is easier to setup with free plans available to get started. Secondly, Cloudflare is a proven and trusted solution used by leading technology organizations around the globe which can also scales better to cater for indefinite workloads. Akamai provides lesser free …
Akamai and Edgecast/Verizon are way over-priced, and also require hassling sales people to negotiate prices, and cloudflare just has their prices posted, and don't require a multi-year contract, etc. StackPath is a regular CDN provider, and is probably cheaper than Cloudflare …
We Previously used Akamai for Website Security, and the price wise very high we are a startup company for Online business, we can't send that. we tried a similar product for Web security then finally we got the Cloudflare.
we are more suited with Cloudflare schemes compared to Akamai, as they are aim for the larger enterprise business. I like that Cloudflare has a much more general and neutral approach, while trying to get closer to us each time. In region like southeast Asia, locality is very …
Cloudflare is less expensive and has more features than Akamai. It has many more points of presence and is faster and more robust than Limelight/Edgio. It was the clear winner when we selected them six years ago, and maintains its leadership in this space.
Cloudflare outperforms in majority of the categories such as Ease of Use, Pricing Transparency, Security & Edge computing capabilities with global network reach. Cloudflare is known for providing a seamless onboarding experience for users of varying technical expertise in …
Cloudflare proved to be the winning choice over its competitors because it was the only solution that's so complete. The other solutions we analyzed were convincing for the caching/CDN aspect but had gaps in other aspects such as security or DDoS protection. Cloudflare also …
Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.
It is easy to set up, and within 10 minutes it is up and running. You can add many domains in one dashboard. So no need for a separate Cloudflare account. I can access all my domain DNS, and customize/add it further. For example by adding the Google Webmaster DNS key or my email provider.
Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible.
Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers.
Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly.
Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution.
DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors.
WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits
The interface in their control centre could be a bit more user-friendly with some of the settings in places that you wouldn't expect them to be. The search offsets this problem to an extent but it's still sometimes slower than you'd like to find what you are looking for.
In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.
We really like to talk to a person on the phone or using chat. But the system is very slow and sending to much email to get the issue solve. Something we don't like to spend time writing on the community forum our issue because we don't want to share detail information of our POC.
We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more likely to suggest CloudFlare (which has a free tier) or an integrated offering from a cloud provider, like Cloudfront.
Firebase can be a good starter for basic projects but as I scaled up, I found it lacking the maturity Cloudflare has. Naturaly, I opted for Cloudflare for bigger projects. I still use Firebase, but for small scale hobby projects only.
Akamai RoI improved over a period of times since it comes with heavy costs, however global deliveries in over 100 counties and global web platforms usage helps improve RoI
With the complex UI challenges, ROI could be impacted negatively when you have to invest in operations and time.
A lot of requests are cached and so egress costs from downstream providers are mitigated.
DDoS protection has also managed to keep our site up and our cloud computing bill down.
Setting up a proxy with a worker made putting various Google Cloud Functions running behind a single URL very easy and performant. Plus they offer API Shield on top of this.