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
sticky.io
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
sticky.io (formerly LimeLight), headquartered in San Francisco, offers their subscription business management platform supporting ecommerce transactions and recurring billing along with customer management, payment gateway, and fraud protected transacting.
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.
Lime Light CRM was built specifically for online marketers, helping them to manage their online sales, contacts, orders, and payments. The software combines a number of features and 3rd party provider integrations to offer the ability to store customer data, build online eCommerce campaigns, create sales reports, and automate order management activities, as well as track, store and report on affiliate data.
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
For an easy to learn CRM this would be it, you can fully train someone on Limelight in less than a few days
It allows for various wildcard searches to be performed in different fields, which speeds up productivity and requires less request to repeat information to locate accounts while speaking to clients.
The CRM holds multiple user accounts and products, and shows failed attempts to purchase and gives reason codes for why the purchase was not successful. Allows for different views to review client accounts.
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.
Note taking can be a hassle, when writing notes there is not a separate tab, or dedicated area which allows for multiple users to leave notes for future users, or administrators to reference regarding actions made to the account, users must search per line item to view notes, or go to a different view to see all notes which is still per line item as you toggle through the notes
If the client has been with the product for several months or years it is a lot of notes you have to reference through which hurts productivity and creates longer calls. A huge con is when you are canceling out a user account, or if you are changing a recurring date if the user clicks the back button after the tasks completes refreshing the webpage to reflect the new dates, the new changes will go undone and revert back to the original data as if no changes were made resulting in user error. The client continues to be billed and discounts continue to apply.
The CRM needs to fix this to prompt "Do you want to undo discount/date change/cancellation?" if the back button is clicked to eliminate user error based on the software limitations. Features which can be customized to automatically perform after actions are done on an account need a function to allow for agents to resend emails if the user did not get them. If automatic emails go to users canceling and they did not get it you have to restart the product then cancel it again to have another automatic email sent to the client/customer or manually send an email. For refunds, if the automatic email did not go out you have to manually send out the email which is time-consuming allocating to another agent or for the current agent. There is a need for an upgrade which allows that after an automatic email has been sent a button will appear which says "resend cancellation" "resend refund" this should also be true if the user inputted the email wrong and it was only noticed by agent after the automatic email was sent and the agent needs to update the email for the client/customer to be able to receive the email at the correct address.
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.
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.
