Alibaba Cloud CDN vs. Cloudflare

Alibaba Cloud CDN is well suited for the below scenarios -

• if you want to get started quickly and don't want to go through a lot of settings ups then go for it.
• The documentation is really good.
• The speed and delivery network and billing price ratio is quite good and in some cases better than competitors.

Incentivized

Based on my experience, Cloudflare is well-suited for high-traffic websites and probably e-commerce platforms. Cloudflare can mitigate the risk of attacks on these websites using WAF and DNS protection mechanisms and provide cached content to the end-users quickly. The websites where it is not suitable are those that need high security and compliance requirements as Cloudflare might not meet all those criteria.

Incentivized

• It provides a great documentation to get started with, which makes the life of Devs easy
• The UI and the metrics graphs are beautify crafted, so all the insights can be easily seen when logged into the system
• The product is really really fast, it makes your app fly. It gives the extra boost that you need in scaling up.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Alibaba Cloud CDN doesn't have the automatic SSL attachment to web apps, which can be great if provided.
• A economical and startup friendly billing plan can be added.
• CDN locations needs to be increased.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

lower cost

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.

Incentivized

Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.

Incentivized

I have only used their support a few times, and most times, they are responsive and able to resolve my issue with a minimal amount of time and effort. However, there was one instance where I simply asked about how to purchase some more resources (redirect rules), and I received some type of automated/AI response that was very unhelpful and gave me no opportunity to escalate to a person.

Incentivized

Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.

Incentivized

Alibaba Cloud CDN is very cost-efficient and faster in some cases than the competitors. It also provides the latest documentation, so you don't have to go through hundred of pages of decade-old documentation like some of the competitors. Along with that they provides state of the art analytics and insights platform which makes the decision making process smooth.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.

Incentivized

• Alibaba Cloud CDN has boosted our web performance by 300X which ensured more user to come to our platform
• Addition of their CDN also guaranteed Zero downtime in our app.
• Their faster issue resolving and great support engineers are always helping us whenever there's a issue.

Incentivized

• 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.