Item: Cloudflare
Rating: 9
Author: Matt Lundstrom

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We provide our hosting customers free CloudFlare services integrated right into their control panel. The CloudFlare plugin allows budget-minded site owners a way to get CDN-like services for a fraction of the cost as a more robust traditional dedicated CDN service. It has added benefits like a web application firewall and several other useful features which are popular among it's users.

Pros and Cons

Extremely easy to set up. A click of a button in the case of GlowHost customers. If shopping direct, the setup may be a bit more involved, but it is typically a matter of updating nameservers or modifying an A record or two.
The web app firewall is managed, which means CloudFlare users do not have to be constantly updating security policy for their web sites. It is all done for them.

There is a bug when Free CloudFlare accounts coming from a cPanel host who have the CloudFlare plugin installed attempt to sign up for an account with CloudFlare directly.
They could/should reward their partners for paid accounts upgrades or free accounts which have converted to paid. Monetarily is one way, but it does not necessarily have to be money. Mentions and co-branding or other marketing would be nice as well.

Return on Investment

The metrics are hard to judge. All I can really say here is that some of our customers request CloudFlare by name, and others need to be educated about its potential benefits. So while it does bring possible revenue, it does incur some expense in training new users on what it is, and how to use it (and when to not, when there are issues). Overall I would say the positives outweigh the negatives.

Alternatives Considered

Incapsula and OnApp CDN

CloudFlare is pretty similar to the Incapsula product in the CDN/WAF departments. Both have their own strengths and weaknesses. Comparing CloudFlare to OnApp; the OnApp CDN is superior due to the number of points of presence and variety of hosting companies that support those POPs. On the other hand, OnApp does not offer a Web Application Firewall like the other two services do.

Likelihood to Recommend

CloudFlare is great for shared hosting customers and perhaps even SMBs. These comprise about 90% of the sites on the Internet so CloudFlare is a great solution for the majority of sites out there. Enterprise customers probably already have their own dedicated CDN solutions and in-house IT departments in place.

Products Replaced

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation

Evaluation Lessons Learned

There's not a lot of competition or variance among providers here, so there's not much I could do to change the selection process.

CloudFlare: Worth Looking Into

Overall Satisfaction with CloudFlare