Cloudflare vs NGINX

• When you need a FREE and EASY TO SETUP SSL certificate on your page (if you don't have the locked locker icon when opening your page, you need it)
• When you want to obfuscate your webpage's IP (any connection will give the Cloudflare's IP)
• You need to speed up the connection for static content (it will not help database connections or dynamic content)
• IF your DNS isn't good (Cloudflare's DNS is amazing, quick, easy, and works pretty well)

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• Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
• Great at serving static content.
• Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
• Open-Source (no cost)!

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• There is a huge jump in price between the mid-tier and enterprise solutions which is hard to justify for smaller businesses, or companies owning many small businesses.
• It is difficult to convert from a CNAME installation back to a DNS based one
• Setting up page-level caching with web workers is counterintuitive for simple websites

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• Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
• I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
• It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
• It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
• I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.

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• Uptime: With Cloudflare's website protection, we have avoided panic-inducing outages and downtime.
• Reduced hosting load: Cloudflare's CDN allows us to use smaller servers and greatly diminish bandwidth usage.
• Reduced domain renewal cost: Most of our domains could be transferred to Cloudflare, where domain renewals are as cheap as possible.
• Increased total website cost: All of Cloudflare's features aren't free, and they increase our monthly overall website cost. The protection and other features are helpful, just not free.

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• Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
• Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
• Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.

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