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 Well suited to:
Startups - Very competitive pricing, better than AWS for object storage and CDN. The less technical - for those looking to implement a CDN, it doesn't get any easier than StackPath The more technical - Well documented API, serverless scripting and container deployments Fast object delivery - StackPath tends to be faster (sometimes much more ) than AWS S3. See below however... Not so well suited to:
Multi-tiered web applications Ultra high bandwidth requirements. Stackpath isn't meant to be a substitute for AWS or Azure when you're looking to push 100s of TBs of traffic. Object storage works well if you don't need fine-grained bucket lifecycle or permissions management. Read full review Pros Content delivery across all continents Web & media acceleration Web application firewall Backend geo-availability Reporting & access metrics Read full review Price competitive. Easy to use. Good reporting. Quick to deploy. Start-up friendly. Good technical information via blog, FAQ and community discussion. I can talk to real person for urgent support. 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 Analytics. Many options hidden in API. Web console. 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 When we identified the need for having a Content Delivery Network to improve our website loading performance we researched a bit and found StackPath. Reading its reviews and the info on its website we have found that they had everything we needed so we didn't need to look for other products.
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 Easy 25-30% improvement in website performance vs non CDN solution Less expensive and faster object storage than AWS Aided greatly in maintaining KPIs in terms of performance, availability Read full review ScreenShots