Likelihood to Recommend Azure Front Door is very easy and fast to set up and implement, if you are looking for an easy solution that is secure and reliable, Front Door does all that and can be configured in a few hours. AFD is a CDN with WAF, accordingly, it is well suited for any CDN Scenario, other providers such as
Akamai or Verizon have a more expensive base price and are harder to manage/configure, Front Door is simple, easy, and provides what's needed when it comes to Web App Security. If you have multiple data centers, have apps in different regions, or targeting a global audience, AFD is an excellent option to get up to speed quickly. If you are looking for more features and capabilities, or planning a very complex setup, Front Door might be sufficient, but other specialized provides such as Imperva,
Cloudflare or
Akamai are generally a bit more advanced (but harder to set up and maintain). It always depends on the scenario, but for us, Front Door was an excellent option and served us very well with no issues.
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros Content delivery across all continents Web & media acceleration Web application firewall Backend geo-availability Reporting & access metrics Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Better control over origin caching Hierarchal Management UI instead of distributed management TLS & Cipher Control Faster publishing or change updates Read full review There really is nothing I can think of. It's simple and intuitive to use after your first instruction on the system. Read full review Alternatives Considered It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including
Akamai , Verizon, and
Cloudflare . They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other providers were much harder to configure and maintain and their overall cost was higher than AFD. For example, Verizon was great, performance was excellent, but reporting/logging was not up to our expectations, and we had many issues with its Rules Engine. AFD is great for delivering your web apps globally quickly and easily, the cost is reasonable and comes with very little operational overhead, the logging and reporting capabilities are very good, additionally, its integration with Azure Cloud Services gives it an advantage over other competitors.
Read full review 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
Read full review Return on Investment AFD implementation was approx. 80% cheaper than other providers, from initiation to operation. It allowed us to minimize backend resources size/processing power, taking all the load from client requests, cutting tens of thousands of dollars monthly on compute, memory, and network bandwidth. Overall, the ROI of AFD is very quick, it is not an expensive solution, therefore, its ROI goals are easy to calculate and achieve, our overall ROI exceeded 300%. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots