Cloudflare: Pretty much the only option, pretty much a requirement, but definitely great
June 11, 2019
Cloudflare: Pretty much the only option, pretty much a requirement, but definitely great
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cloudflare
We use Cloudflare for many purposes:
- Website protection against malicious traffic and targeted attacks
- CDN to cache our site content reducing bandwidth and server load
- DNS for dozens of domains and web services
- Domain registration and renewal
- Security: Cloudflare keeps our website safe from DDoS attacks and other malicious traffic.
- CDN: Cloudflare caches our website content, increasing our website's reliability and reducing server load. This saves on bandwidth costs from web servers.
- Registrar: We can migrate domains to Cloudflare, though they don't currently allow the purchase of new domain names. The benefit of this is cheaper renewal fees and fewer systems involved in managing our domains.
- Registrar features very limited: There are benefits to moving existing domain ownership to a Cloudflare account, but there are limitations: No new domain registration; Not all TLDs are supported; Domain transfer is tedious since there is no bulk transfer option (this also locks credit cards when transferring many domains since each is an individual transaction).
- Cost increases quickly: Many features are available free but most business websites need more advanced features, which are billed monthly. These subscriptions get costly very quickly, especially when added to separate hosting and licensing fees.
- Complicated by nature: The services Cloudflare provides are technical in nature and therefore not straightforward. This is the nature of the service though, Cloudflare makes it as easy to use as possible.
- Uptime: With Cloudflare's website protection, we have avoided panic-inducing outages and downtime.
- Reduced hosting load: Cloudflare's CDN allows us to use smaller servers and greatly diminish bandwidth usage.
- Reduced domain renewal cost: Most of our domains could be transferred to Cloudflare, where domain renewals are as cheap as possible.
- Increased total website cost: All of Cloudflare's features aren't free, and they increase our monthly overall website cost. The protection and other features are helpful, just not free.
As a total package, Cloudflare is pretty unique. Their site protection is essentially the only option for this type of service, but it also works great. Additionally, basic website protection can be set up at no cost. For domain registration, Cloudflare's offering feels young but is very low cost. As a CDN, Cloudflare is easy to implement but not as effective as your own server cluster (but Cloudflare is much cheaper of course). Overall, the site protection is a no brainer given its effectiveness and cost ($0). Therefore, other features might as well be set up even if not using any paid options.