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CloudFlare: Best Starter CDN Hands Down
November 25, 2019

CloudFlare: Best Starter CDN Hands Down

Ben Gelsey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with CloudFlare

Every website that I work on either for my own business (Flights Machine) or clients gets put on the CloudFlare free plan. CloudFlare has majorly disrupted a few web hosting related industries including:
  • SSL certificate issuers
  • Content delivery networks
  • DNS managers
These 3 services used to cost money and now CloudFlare offers all of them for free. Unless your website has very special needs, CloudFlare does the job perfectly, for free, with these 3 use-cases.
  • DNS management.
  • SSL certificate issuance (https).
  • Content delivery network (CDN).
  • Less confusing user-interface.
  • Better tutorials on the available functionality.
  • Don't functionally lock out users without Javascript from using CloudFlare-enabled websites.
  • Saves us $100+ yearly on SSL certificate issuance price.
  • Saves us $X00 per year in lieu of paying for a CDN.
  • Increases user happiness with the speed-boost provided by the CDN.
Compared to Fastly and Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare blows away the competition. It is incredible how much CloudFlare offers for free compared to these other solutions. With Fastly, expect a minimum bill of $50 per month, if not $X00 for decently trafficked sites. AWS CloudFront is reasonably priced and if you are fully on the AWS stack it could make sense to use it instead of CloudFlare. But for non-AWS sites I would recommend CloudFlare over AWS CloudFront.
While I've never contacted CloudFlare's customer support, I've read through a good amount of their documentation and tutorials. Overall the documentation is broad but not deep. While every section and function of CloudFlare's offering is covered, sometimes the detail is lacking. With configuration & server-related functionality, for peace of mind you want to know exactly how things will play out before making a change. With CloudFlare's documentation sometimes you don't get that peace of mind.

Do you think Cloudflare delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cloudflare's feature set?

Yes

Did Cloudflare live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cloudflare go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cloudflare again?

Yes

Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Zoom, TransferWise, Gitlab, GitHub, Bitbucket, Namecheap, Google Domains, Google Ads (formerly AdWords), Google Ad Manager, Google Analytics, Google App Engine, Google Drive, Google Forms, Google Hangouts, Google Maps API, Google Optimize, Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, Google Trends, Google Voice
If you have a website that you want secure (https) and fast (CDN) then the CloudFlare free plan is a no-brainer. For anything other than a simple personal blog/website, CloudFlare makes sense (and it would be good even for that humble blog as well). Ever since I discovered CloudFlare I've used them for every single website I create. The funny thing is, none of my sites have needed to go beyond CloudFlare's free plan, so I still haven't actually paid them.