Cloudflare Reviews

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.

We use it for DNS load balancing and WAF. 

The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules. 

The product needs to improve its automation. 

I have been using the product for two and a half years. 

I would rate the product's stability a ten out of ten since it never went down for me. 

I would rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten since I didn't encounter any issues with it. 

The tool's setup straightforward. 

We have had ROI with the tool's use since it never gave us downtime and made us lose millions. 

I will rate the product an eight out of ten. Cloudflare is better than Cloud DNS. You need to start using Terraform along with Cloudflare. It will make your life easier without the need for manual creation. People usually thing they are going to use Cloudflare less but will end up using it more. 

For DDOS mitigation.

Provides peace of mind. We do not have to do things over and over, or double check their work, or worry about what could have happened due to a potential DDOS attack, if we didn't have protection.

Convenient

Ease of deployment

I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution.

Also, the reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

I can't say, since we actually just deployed it. Our organization has already grown. For now, it serves our needs and manages are our expansion.

I'm quite comfortable with them so I don't see a big issue. We get fairly good support. The earlier issues that we had, some minor issues here and there, we got them resolved. They resolve our issues in a timely manner.

I think any DDOS solution is going to be complex. But we could actually follow the process and implement the solution. So it was not that complex, in that sense. And the tech support was there to provide feedback and support.

We didn't get any training other than you reading up materials and working with tech support.

I think the pricing is competitive.

I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers.

We did review a couple of options, Tenable and a couple of others. We settled on Cloudflare because of price, support, and of course comfort in dealing with a vendor that was supporting us.

My advice would be to review exactly what you need and talk to different people to understand the potential advantages and pitfalls of implementing these kinds of solutions. Then identify the right product to meet your requirements.

From a solution perspective and from a product perspective I would give Cloudflare an eight out of 10. It's a reasonably priced solution that meets customers' needs and it's not too difficult to deploy.

• DNS setup: Their DNS allows you to move control over DNS from your own server to a third party. This allows you to avoid running DNS locally that might consume resources or become unavailable if something happens with your local DNS server.
• DDoS protection: DDoS protection is what CloudFlare is known for. They are known to prevent DDoS attacks from taking down your server.
• Distributed content delivery (CDN): Their content delivery network is also a nice feature which can keep a website accessible even if your webserver goes down.

The setup and configuration is also easy to perform and their support is excellent.

This product has kept the site up while under an attack.

None that I can think of at this point. Their enterprise-level DDoS mitigation plans are costly but they are cost effective compared to any on-premises/distributed solutions that can go upwards of high six figures to implement. If a company like Sony can be taken offline for a week due to an attack, then there is not much that can be done by midsized/startups to prevent these attacks. For these companies, CloudFlare is ideal.

I have used it for five years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. You can move up to bigger packages if you are under a heavy DDoS attack.

Technical support is excellent.

I did not previously use a different solution. This was the first CDN company I have used.

Initial setup was simple enough for novices. They have plenty of documentation on their site.

Start off with their free plan. However, major DDoS protection is only provided with their paid plans. I would start with the free plan to test or to simply move DNS off your local server to them to free up resources.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. They are an industry leader in CDN.

If you need your website accessible at all times, consider going with them.

I use this for DNS for many of my former clients and personal sites. When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers. 

The second major use case is as a CDN where I will push logic to the edge for caching and redirects.

I have not used it at my current organization, but in the past I have used it to bring enterprise-grade features to my small business clients at low or no cost.

Centralized, full-featured DNS.

Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript.

They also lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem.

There has been some downtime over the years, but it was usually handled well.

I have only scaled this to a few million viewers with a couple TB of traffic, but I didn’t see any issues.

I have mainly been on their lower accounts which don’t really come with support.

I have used a couple of different solutions like Incapsula, CloudFront, and Akamai, but for different projects, not before or after.

It is very easy for someone who knows DNS. It is somewhat opinionated and pushes you into higher tiers, but overall it is easy.

You can get a lot out of the lower accounts. 

I have used several in the space and I still use, Route 53, DynDNS, etc.

This product is good for simple things, but you may need other tools for more fine-grained control of specific portions.

I have used the cache feature of CloudFlare CDN.

CloudFlare is very easy to set up for my site domain.

It is very easy to maintain.

CloudFlare flushes the cache immediately, which is not supported by some of the other CDN networks such as Akamai and Amazon CloudFront. These CDNs take some time that can vary between 5-15 minutes (minimum).

No comments, because I am using it only for creating a cache flushing tool that will work on Adobe Experience Manger (AEM).

There are some features missing or might not be visible to me as I am using its free website plan. These features are:

• CloudFlare doesn't provide the cache flush history. I.e., I am not able to find out the URL information of those I have recently flushed. It makes me uncomfortable when I work in a multiple-author environment and they all have cache-flushing rights.
• It doesn't support a wildcard (*) as some of its competitors support; for example, Amazon CloudFront supports (*) annotation for flushing the complete content tree.
• CloudFlare also does not have any API as some of its rivals provide, such as Amazon CloudFront.

I have used it for the last 10 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I don't need any technical supports because there are a number of blogs with solutions for most of the problems. Because of these blogs, I haven’t used this feature until now, so I’m not able to rate this feature.

Before using CloudFlare, I used Amazon CloudFront and Akamai.

I used CloudFlare because I was creating a cache flushing tool for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). This tool will be responsible for flushing the cache from different CDN networks, such as Akamai, CloudFront, and CloudFlare.

Initial setup is straightforward and easily configurable, even if a person doesn't have any knowledge of CloudFlare. He/she can easily set up CloudFlare.

I’m not able to comment on this because I am using the free website plan.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

In my opinion, CloudFlare is one of the best CDN networks I have ever used. It provides a quick flushing feature that is not supported in some of other popular CDN networks such as Akamai and CloudFront. CloudFlare is a very easy-to-use CDN as compared to others.