Cloudflare vs NGINX

• Security: Cloudflare keeps our website safe from DDoS attacks and other malicious traffic.
• CDN: Cloudflare caches our website content, increasing our website's reliability and reducing server load. This saves on bandwidth costs from web servers.
• Registrar: We can migrate domains to Cloudflare, though they don't currently allow the purchase of new domain names. The benefit of this is cheaper renewal fees and fewer systems involved in managing our domains.

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• Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
• Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
• SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
• Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

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• Multiple Users - It would be great to be able to have multiple users on one account.
• Itemized Cache - Would love to see a list of files that have been cached by CloudFlare's CDN and when they will expire. Also nice to optionally remove one or more files from the cache.

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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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• Our business has online presences to reassure our customers, not to gain new ones, so the actual ROI is smaller than for most other people.
• CloudFlare is super easy to use so I can make adjustments on the fly.
• Safety and security is important and I don't have to worry about a lot of things due to CloudFlare.

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• Improved the reliability of our site. Before using Nginx, with Apache as our app server, there were times when we had to manually go in and restart Apache to bring the site back online. We've never had to do that with Nginx.
• Made our web server more memory efficient -- Nginx has a very small memory footprint, on the order of under 100 MB. This makes it suitable even for cheap VPS machines.
• The Nginx community provides online examples of configurations, so it saves us time in writing the config files from scratch.

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