Amazon Route 53 vs. Cloudflare

- Routing users to the closest or best-performing resources: Route 53 allows you to use geolocation and latency-based routing to route users to the resources that will give them the best performance. - Load balancing: Route 53 can be used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances or Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks, to improve the availability and scalability of your application. - Managing domain names: Route 53 can be used to register domain names and manage DNS records, making it a one-stop solution for managing your domain name and routing traffic to your resources. Scenarios where Route 53 is less appropriate include:Applications with very high query rates: Route 53 is designed to handle millions of queries per second, but if your application generates an extremely high query rate, you may need to use a specialized DNS service.Applications that require very low latency: Route 53 is designed to provide low-latency DNS service, but if your application requires ultra-low latency, you may need to use a specialized DNS service or a self-hosted DNS solution.Applications that require advanced security features: Route 53 provides basic security features such as DNSSEC, but if your application requires advanced security features such as DDoS protection, you may need to use a specialized DNS service.

Incentivized

Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.

Incentivized

• Uptime - Route53 is highly performant and available. We have had only 3-4 instances in the last 12 years when we had any downtime or outages due to Route53.
• Extensive API layer on Route53 that allows integration with external tools and SDK's (Boto, Terraform, etc)
• Closely integrated with the other AWS services. Makes it easy to operate the infra.

Incentivized

• The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
• Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
• One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.

Incentivized

• During initial setup when you are using Route 53 or DNS systems for very first time, there are little number of documentation from AWS which is kinda of little tough. But, once you get hold of it, its a cake walk for everyone.
• Health checks are kinda of little costly when Compared to other big players, but that doesn't affect much when you compare its uses.
• The logging is well structured though its costly

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

You need to know what DNS is; this is a tool built for developers who already know the technology and are just looking for a DNS management tool. The tool is very usable given that. If you're not familiar with DNS, Route53 isn't really for you and you won't find it to be very usable-- you'll need to go read the documentation, and that will start with learning what DNS is

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

Until today, I have never needed support to Route53 because the documentation is great. But, I have needed it for other services. And they're near perfect always. Except that they don't have Portuguese support yet and they're sometimes slow to answer (48 hours in non-critical ones, in two tickets). But usually, they're amazing!

Incentivized

Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We chose Amazon Route 53 over Azure DNS for its advanced routing, built-in health checks, and seamless integration with AWS services like EC2, ALB, and CloudFront. Amazon Route 53 also supports domain registration and automated failover, which Azure DNS lacks natively. Its global reliability and automation capabilities made it ideal for our multi-region AWS setup, while Azure DNS is better suited for simple, Azure-only environments without complex routing needs.

Incentivized

They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.

They have very good reputation.

They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• All of our brand domain names (about 80 brands) are managed in there
• Many non marketing or brand domains are also in there
• There isn't any defined ROI because it's such a trivial and necessary service with impacts all business operations

Incentivized

• Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
• WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
• CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
• DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.

Incentivized