Cloudflare Reviews

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. 

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.

• Provides a very easy DNS management: Allows you to create various sub-domains and A-record management
• Handy interface with one-click to switch the service on and off
• Global coverage supports the DNS queries with its load balancing feature
• Helps to secure your web from DDoS attacks and unwanted bots
• Has a very user-friendly interface to handle the allowed IPs if you need to bypass/block any particular region or identified bots.
• Web optimization features such as ‘Automatic Content Caching’, ‘Rocket Loader’, and ‘AutoMinify’, which help to minimize the website loading time and increase the website response.

• We use the DNS management for all of our domains. It brings all websites under the umbrella of CloudFlare.
• We no longer require any other security levels, as all websites under CloudFlare wrappers are secure with DDoS protection.
• We do not need to implement complex caching techniques as the CloudFlare content caching helps to minimize the website load time.

For DDoS protection and website downtime, it would be nice to have a feature to provide email/SMS alerts that can be implemented like Pingdom and other solutions.

I implemented these solutions in 2013.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

Until now, I didn’t require much technical support. I try to find any help by myself through the interface.

I did not use any previous solution. In fact, I searched for a few and selected CloudFlare.

The product is very straightforward and simple to implement. Those are the main reasons for using it.

I haven’t gone through the other pricing plans. For the services I am using, it is a bit expensive. It is worth the price when you weight it against time and cost.

Before selecting CloudFlare, we looked at Amazon products. Although AWS provides a range of services and is a standardized platform, I found CloudFlare to be a much easier and faster solution for websites.

If someone is looking for a secure and optimized wrapper over an open website, I would suggest CloudFlare services. It will instantly help you to secure and optimize websites/web pages or blogs. It is quick, easy to use, and simple to implement.

• 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.

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.

The aggressive caching and DDOS mitigation are the most valuable features offered by Cloudflare. Website traffic analytics and threat insights are also very useful.

Utilizing Cloudflare allows us to deploy websites using less hardware due to their caching and helps us serve pages to our customers more quickly and efficiently.

More insight into analytics and threats would be a good place to start improving cloudflare. Also less 501 and 504 errors would be good too.

I've used Cloudflare since 2012 and am currently using the latest version. I've utilized it with several different websites successfully.

No issues encountered.

Only the occasional network issues, some in 2013, where all Cloudflare customers were affected, but much less lately.

No issues encountered.

Good, as the few times I've required customer service, it was more technical but they were always helpful in directing me to the people I needed to speak to.

Excellent. The representatives are knowledgeable and online documentation is great.

Cloudflare was the first service of this type I've used.

It was very easy to get setup on Cloudflare. They have made it even easier recently, and all that needs to be done is to enter your DNS records into their interface and the configuration is done.

We implemented it in-house.

Setup cost was zero and currently we are using the $20 a month plan. I've used the business tier in the past which costs $200 a month.

I don't know of other vendors who offer a comparable service.

I would recommend that you use it. It has been very useful and well worth the cost to me over the last three years.

DDoS protection is this product’s most valuable feature. Even if it can’t handle very large-scale attacks, protection is easier having CloudFlare as a primary shield.

If you choose to do so, you can use their DNS servers. Because DNS amplification is also a vector of attack, this is one more optional feature you can delegate to CloudFlare at no additional cost.

It allows us to have a backup in case Incapsula has issues.

I would like to not need a separate server for non-www redirection under the CNAME setup option. With Incapsula, they simply tell me to point the non-www records to the servers they tell me and they take care of the non-www redirection. In CloudFlare's case, I need to get an external server, set up the redirection there using Apache or NGINX and put my own SSL certificates there.

I have used it for one year.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

We previously used pretty much all solutions. In some cases, Incapsula is better; in others, CloudFlare is.

We were used to the CNAME setup. Initially, this was not offered but now it is. The only issue is handling the non-www redirections that, with CNAME setup, requires us to use an external server. (Incapsula does not.)

Pricing and licensing is standard when compared to its competitors.

Don’t hesitate to contact support; they answer very quickly.