Cloudflare Reviews

We are an IT consulting company, we provide solutions to our customers. We implement the solutions for our customers. Some of our customers use CloudFlare, some of them are using  Imperva and Palo Alto.

Our customers use this solution for any web traffic, mostly GCP or to AWS cloud as a backend.

I like caching and DDoS. There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS.

Latencies are always a problem.

Also, one thing I would say is you have to maintain DNS through their services. I don't know if that's a requirement or not.

Latencies are the key issue. If you are not caching and just using DDoS then definitely, there are some latencies added to the traffic.

I have been working with Cloudflare for more than six years.

We work with many different versions. For new customers, we use the latest version.

I haven't had any issues with stability. We haven't heard anything from our clients.

It's a stable solution.

It is easy to scale. We haven't had any problems with scalability.

We have not used technical support.

Cloudflare is very straightforward. It is easy to set up.

There is no installation, you just go through the configuration process.

The price is reasonable.

It all depends on what the customer is looking for. These are two different areas. Basically, CloudFare is completely Cloud-based, whereas Imperva I can have a physical appliance or a virtual appliance, or a cloud-based. 

My solution is based on what customers are looking for, but Cloudflare is pretty good and getting really popular in terms of DDoS, the paid version of it.

We looked at the service. What are acceptable latencies? Is it okay to route through a different vendor, and before it reaches the backup? They have to go through multiple vendors. You also have to consider what the latencies cost and is that acceptable for the service. These are key things you need to consider when selecting a cloud-based vendor for DDoS.

I would rate Cloudflare a nine out of ten.

• Caching: Caching helps save bandwidth with the CloudFlare CDN
• Page rules: Page rules help shape traffic to the appropriate pages.

CloudFlare's caching brings the load speed down from 4.32 seconds to 2.45 seconds.

The Always Online feature has room for improvement. It seems to work sometimes and not others even with the pro version.

The feature shows a cached version of your live site if your host is offline. When your site is offline CloudFlare shows this:

We moved our DNS to CloudFlare about three years ago.

I have not encountered any stability issues; the platform is rock solid.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; moving to the pro version was a simple as a click.

Technical support is 10/10. Our one call about a caching issue was easily fixed and it turned out to be a problem we caused, not CloudFlare.

We used our own name servers and Snort. We switched due to simplicity of the CloudFlare interface.

Initial setup was straightforward. CloudFlare's setup wizards made it easy.

Start with the free plan and move up as needed. It was easy to upgrade and downgrade.

We looked at GoDaddy DNS and Amazon DNS services. After reading the reviews online, we jumped to CloudFlare.

Give it a shot. The setup was easy and you can see the results right away.

Our company provides the solution to customers who need website load balancing or DDoS protection. Customers with minimal traffic use the Business Plan and customers with a huge amount of traffic use the Enterprise Plan. 

We currently have thirty customers on the Business Plan and three customers on the Enterprise Plan. 

The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks. 

The solution should expand its learning portal for partners to include a few demo accounts for learning the product and developing knowledge or technical expertise. 

Support response time could be improved. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable, has curbing centers in Pakistan, and is widely used. 

The solution is scalable to each customer's needs. For example, you can scale up if you have two domains and want to add a third. It is easy to incorporate scaling. 

The technical support response time for Business Plan customers could be reduced. Most companies opt for this cost-effective plan but they should receive the same service as the Enterprise Plan. Currently, response time for Business Plan customers is six to eight hours and that should be minimized. 

I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The solution is easy to setup and share with customers. We categorize a customer's needs and recommend the best plan based on traffic and whether they need load balancing, bot management, routing, and unlimited bandwidth.  

We implement the solution for our customers. Deployment includes one project manager and one support technician. 

The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth. 

I rate the licensing options an eight out of ten. 

The solution is a great fit for customers who want unlimited bandwidth. 

Competitors such as Akamai have strict options for bandwidth so might not be a good fit. 

I recommend the solution for customers who don't yet have an idea how much bandwidth they need or who anticipate upscaling in a few months. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

I just switched to Cloudflare as my domain registrar. That led me to use their CDN service, and I will probably use them for SSL when that is available. 

Cloudflare has made management of my website much easier by combining various functions in one platform without compromising quality. There are also less dark UX patterns than other vendors, so I have peace of mind knowing they aren't trying to trick me or make complicated procedures to attempt to lock me into their service. That is very refreshing!

The dashboard is very well thought out, giving useful information and providing easy access to useful functionality I wasn't aware of.

This is a very minor thing since I can't think of many ways for them to improve: It looks like they don't support as many TLDs as other registrars, but since they are very new as a registrar, I expect this may improve soon. For example, there are many TLDs in this list, but /co is missing: https://www.cloudflare.com/tld...

This solution has been stable so far, and monitoring of Cloudflare has shown them to be reliable.

So far, scalability has done well, but I am not a heavy user.

I haven't contacted support which indicates a good self-serve product. The tools to answer your own questions are there, so support is built-in without ever needing to reach a person. 

I switched to Cloudflare from GoDaddy because Cloudflare promoted "at cost" domains. 

The initial setup was very straightforward.

Self-managed.

Less cost for domains and more satisfaction which is hard to put a dollar value to.

Cost for all services I have researched in Cloudflare is straightforward, and they don't include hidden fees. I'm not a heavy CDN user since I don't get much traffic, so I can't speak too much about the value for their CDN.

I've used various solutions like full hosting companies (Bluehost, iPage, etc.) and most recently GoDaddy. I also looked at Google domains and Namecheap. 

I encourage anyone interested in holistic internet service delivery solutions to check out Cloudflare. They have nice simple solutions that work well together, are easy to set up, and their UI/UX is intuitive.

Cloudflare is easy to use. It's very intuitive. Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva. I think Imperva is far richer in features from what I can see, but I think that can bring its own pains to be honest. For this reason, I think Cloudflare is a simpler version. 

With Imperva, you can drill down to packet-level very easily. It's very, very good at drilling down deeper and deeper into the packet. I think that is available with Cloudflare, but it's not as good. It doesn't seem to provide us with the same kind of search capability as Imperva. Having said that, I think that's one of the advantages of Cloudflare because you just have to click a button and drill down via clicking. I actually like Cloudflare to be honest. Imperva is almost too difficult for normal businesses — it's too complex. There's almost too much information there. Whereas with Cloudflare, it's easier to drill down and it's more intuitive.

I've only been using Cloudflare for a week.

I wasn't involved in the implementation, so I have no idea how much it costs. 

I think this solution is quite intuitive. For businesses that don't have a dedicated security team, I think it's a better product; it's more intuitive for people like us. I'm a network security engineer, but I'm not a dedicated security official. I've too many other things going on to have the time to do the rule sets that you need if you're working with Imperva — I think a lot of that is down to you as the customer. With Cloudflare, I think a lot of that happens in the background. 

I've been working with it for a week and a half so I'm not the best person to say if it's better or worse than Imperva. My only reaction is that maybe it's not as feature-rich for the end-user. Whether that's an advantage, well, that's questionable. Maybe we don't need all of those features sometimes — it depends on the business. The business I'm working in now is a very different business with a different kind of security model. The business I was working with when I used Imperva probably needed that feature-rich capability.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Cloudflare a rating of eight. It's quite intuitive. I like it. From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet.

Cloudflare is used for service protection. We use this solution as a managed service for our end user customers, such as banking users for protection.

The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.

Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud.

I have been using Cloudflare for approximately five months.

There were a few months when we were doing some updates and there were some issues with the stability. However, the one or two times we had problems it is not enough to say that it is not a stable solution in general.

I rate the stability of Cloudflare an eight out of ten.

The solution can scale well.

I rate the scalability of Cloudflare an eight out of ten.

The technical support from the vendor could be better.

The support is provided online and most of the technical advice is provided by an open community. The level of support is not enough. For example, if you start using this solution and do not have a lab there needs to be someone that can speed up your process. In this case, the community is not enough, it could be better.

I rate the support from Cloudflare a six out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup was stressful. You have to tune the configuration for the integration which is important to have it done correctly.

The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for.

Most of the vendors are building new functionality and are moving in the same direction.

I rate Cloudflare an eight out of ten.

I work as the Senior SEO Strategist on a very small in-house team of digital marketers for Lakeview Health, a drug and alcohol rehab. Upon starting my role, one of my first tasks was migrating our websites to a new web hosting provider so that we could take ownership of them. With all our sites developed in WordPress, I decided on hosting with WP Engine which recommended Cloudflare in the setup process. 

In the past, I worked in environments where the developers and IT team managed the websites, so I admit that there are gaps of knowledge in my understanding of how the internet works. Using Cloudflare made the process of migrating much easier and gave me the satisfaction of knowing we’d receive enhanced security features, alongside a reputable CDN, simple DNS hosting, and the many other solutions Cloudflare offers.

I manage these websites independently within my organization and, with exception of a third-party vendor, I am the only one that has access to our Cloudflare account. It helps me ensure the sites are running optimally and securely.

The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules.

I will say, in the years I have used Cloudflare, one thing I love is the constant improvements and developments being made.

One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country.

I would rate Cloudflare a nine out of 10. I haven’t used any other solutions that might compete with Cloudflare, so I am a bit biased, but for ease of use, features, and cost effectiveness, I think it’s a great solution.

These are some of the valuable features:

• Free 15 year SSL certificates (I used to need to pay for these).
• Spam protection to help prevent spam and unnecessary bot traffic.
• Edge caching on a CDN. This is nice for WordPress sites. I can get away without caching static content on origin servers.
• Helps increase security as a reverse proxy.

Once a domain's name servers have been pointed to CloudFlare, you never have to worry about DNS propagation. This would be the case, for example, if you wanted to point a domain to a different EC2/digital ocean instance.

In that sense, it's marketing that could use some improvement. It is hard to call your own product a "necessity", but I truly believe that it, or something like it, is a necessity. Without it, you are risking higher costs, more spam, more failures, and less satisfied customers. They need to convince non-technical people why it's so awesome.

CloudFlare solves a lot of problems that many non-technical people don't even know exist. In addition to the obvious ones, like SSL security, spam protection, edge caching across a CDN, you have an easy way for clients to point their domains and DNS management over to CloudFlare.

Here are some scenarios:

• Let's say, down the road, you need to add an email service like Mailgun. You don't need to ask the client to add weird sounding DNS records. You can just add them in CloudFlare. This alone saves hours, if not days, of needless client communication.
• Let's say you need to point to a different server instance and you need to guarantee that the new instance's content is live at exactly 7:57 a.m. EST. Just point CloudFlare to the new instance and clear its cache at that time.
• Let’s say you need to create a stage environment.  You can add the DNS record and point that to wherever you'd like.
• I have found that clients prefer to own their own domain names, and give developers full server access. With CloudFlare, you can do just that while maintaining access to the domain's DNS records to be better able to do your job.

Another reason it's awesome is that you don't need your server to handle every request. Most of the traffic is to static resources and will be served by CloudFlare. This provides incredible peace of mind for higher traffic sites.

If your site has almost no static content, and is configured to auto-scale server instances based on demand, CloudFlare is still a relief because you will know that you are not paying for bad traffic.

Without CloudFlare, if some bot decides to send spam requests every day to your site, you'd likely pay for that traffic in one way or another.

We have used this solution for about two years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The installation was complex until I learned what I had to learn. Once you learn about domains, DNS, name servers, propagation, and web server management, CloudFlare is simple. Before you learn, it's quite hard to understand and debug DNS and configuration issues.

For example, I was once trying to SSH into the domain instead of an instance's IP address. It took me forever to understand why it was not going to work.

I recommend the free plan for most users.

Ask for guidance from someone who has done it before.