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).
$20
per month
Azure Front Door
Score 5.7 out of 10
N/A
Azure Front Door is a cloud content delivery network (CDN) service that helps users deliver high performance, scalability, and a secure user experiences for content and applications. It includes a customizable rules engine for advanced routing capabilities. It boasts instant scalability with global HTTP load balancing and failover.
It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including Akamai, Verizon, and Cloudflare. They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other …
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.
Azure Front Door is very easy and fast to set up and implement, if you are looking for an easy solution that is secure and reliable, Front Door does all that and can be configured in a few hours. AFD is a CDN with WAF, accordingly, it is well suited for any CDN Scenario, other providers such as Akamai or Verizon have a more expensive base price and are harder to manage/configure, Front Door is simple, easy, and provides what's needed when it comes to Web App Security. If you have multiple data centers, have apps in different regions, or targeting a global audience, AFD is an excellent option to get up to speed quickly. If you are looking for more features and capabilities, or planning a very complex setup, Front Door might be sufficient, but other specialized provides such as Imperva, Cloudflare or Akamai are generally a bit more advanced (but harder to set up and maintain). It always depends on the scenario, but for us, Front Door was an excellent option and served us very well with no issues.
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
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.
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.
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.
It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including Akamai, Verizon, and Cloudflare. They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other providers were much harder to configure and maintain and their overall cost was higher than AFD. For example, Verizon was great, performance was excellent, but reporting/logging was not up to our expectations, and we had many issues with its Rules Engine. AFD is great for delivering your web apps globally quickly and easily, the cost is reasonable and comes with very little operational overhead, the logging and reporting capabilities are very good, additionally, its integration with Azure Cloud Services gives it an advantage over other competitors.
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.
AFD implementation was approx. 80% cheaper than other providers, from initiation to operation.
It allowed us to minimize backend resources size/processing power, taking all the load from client requests, cutting tens of thousands of dollars monthly on compute, memory, and network bandwidth.
Overall, the ROI of AFD is very quick, it is not an expensive solution, therefore, its ROI goals are easy to calculate and achieve, our overall ROI exceeded 300%.
