Item: Cloudflare
Rating: 10
Author: Nicholas Tantillo

Overall Satisfaction with Cloudflare

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My customers are using the mid-tier Cloudflare account for DDoS protection on multiple company websites as well as for caching and CDN. Their website performance has gone up considerably since adopting it. The WAF (Web Application Firewall) rules have been easy to configure for multiple WordPress environments and have already blocked many different types of threats. The detailed cache analysis has also helped their marketing departments with SEO and other optimizations.
I personally use the free tier as a nameserver for my small side projects and have found Cloudflare to be very generous in that regard.

Pros and Cons

Pros

DDoS Protection is a must in the current climate
WAF let you block regions where you have no customers or business
CDN greatly speeds up websites, especially on mobile devices

Cons

There is a huge jump in price between the mid-tier and enterprise solutions which is hard to justify for smaller businesses, or companies owning many small businesses.
It is difficult to convert from a CNAME installation back to a DNS based one
Setting up page-level caching with web workers is counterintuitive for simple websites

Most Important Features

DDoS Protection
CDN for Load Times
Nameserver management (DNS Zone)

Return on Investment

Site load times have made marketing very happy with their SEO reports
Threats against the organization can be more easily mitigated, saving time and money
Cost savings on SSLs and bandwidth across the board

Alternatives Considered

We have also looked into Securi Platform for WordPress. It has nice features that are comparable but the pricing model was less compatible with our organization. The SiteGround plugins for WordPress also helped with caching, but it could not compare to Cloudflare on speed. We considered other cloud hosting platforms (Amazon AWS, Azure, etc.) but they were more expensive and were not as easy to set up as SiteGround VPS + Cloudflare.
Choosing a good host is important though, Cloudflare works best in combination with a host that follows best practices.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Visual Studio IDE, WordPress, SiteGround

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are worried about having a DDoS against you, having a product like CloudFlare can be very helpful. It's also great for replacing external nameservers (we used Rackspace.) The ability to proxy IPs is very convenient. CDN can improve load times considerably.
The SSL services provided by Cloudflare are very flexible and make basic security very easy to set up.
It's less suited if there are multiple DNS-based services installed on a root domain, such as Office 365, Mimecast, or Mailgun. In my experience, it makes these services harder to configure. It also makes getting external SSL certificates a little more difficult especially if there is a wildcard needed for multiple types of servers.

Comments

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CloudFlare offers a solid platform for securing and optimizing websites of all sizes