HAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.
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OnApp CDN
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
OnApp, headquartered in London, provides a content delivery network (CDN).
It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
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
A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.
It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
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
Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
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.
