Cloudflare vs. OnApp CDN

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

OnApp CDN is great for virtually any site with a desire or requirement to offload processing resources to a content delivery network in general. The OnApp CDN is one of the largest, if not largest CDNs on the planet and is well equipped to handle virtually any type of file distribution, including video. Video distribution POPs on the OnApp CDN are less available because each host that offers video has special requirements they may or may not be willing to get involved with. If you plan to distribute video on OnApp CDN first check if the number of POPs available for serving video suit your needs

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

• Ease of setup. You can be CDN enabled within a few minutes.
• Huge CDN network rivals any other out there.
• Competitive pricing due to web hosts who own OnApp CDN Edge Servers competing for traffic on their CDN POPs.

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

• There really is nothing I can think of. It's simple and intuitive to use after your first instruction on the system.

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

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

We compared VMware for its virtualization capabilities and ended up deciding on OnApp as the UI was more intuitive for less technical support staff, which meant that our customers would have more staff available to help them with cloud related issues. We also checked our Akamai specifically for CDN however again the OnApp platform seemed simpler and less expensive to leverage, and with the added benefit that we had more control of the CDN 'in-house' than using a fully third party platform

Incentivized

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

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.

• OnApp in general has been a good investment, though in the early days this was a questionable result as stability was nothing like what it is today. Things have gotten much better over the years and I would anticipate OnApp to generate ROI so long as customers are looking for cloud and CDN solutions in general. I'm not sure that investing in OnApp as a hosting provider specifically for the CDN capability will generate any positive return, but the OnApp system as a whole has the features required that most should be able to make a return on.

Incentivized