Cloudflare and Amazon Route 53 are major players in the domain management and internet security industry. Cloudflare takes the lead with its robust CDN and DDoS protection, while Amazon Route 53 excels with comprehensive DNS management integrated into AWS services.
Features: Cloudflare is recognized for its CDN, DDoS protection capabilities, and web application firewall. The flexible SSL certificates and extensive traffic analytics provide enhanced security and performance monitoring. Amazon Route 53 stands out with superior DNS management, seamless AWS integration, and traffic routing features which make it a reliable DNS solution.
Room for Improvement: Cloudflare users suggest enhanced support responsiveness and better CDN speeds compared to alternatives. There is also a call for improved analytics tools. Amazon Route 53 could benefit from a simplified pricing structure, a more intuitive user interface, and better integration capabilities with on-premise environments.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare is favored for its deployment in public cloud environments, providing moderate support for hybrid and private clouds. Customer service reviews are mixed, often citing delayed response times. Amazon Route 53 is known for its ease of deployment within AWS ecosystems and stronger customer service reputation, though its initial setup process can seem complex to some users.
Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare's pricing ranges from a free tier for small businesses to premium enterprise-level plans. Users commend its cost-effectiveness, particularly in enhancing site security and lowering operational costs. Amazon Route 53 has a usage-based pricing model considered moderate, with some perceiving it as pricey compared to competitors. Despite higher costs, its reliability and integration with AWS provide substantial ROI for DNS management needs.
The main factors are time-saving and security, even if the cost is slightly higher.
You would only lose money if you had an attack and you need to calculate the cost against the risks.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
We have had ROI with the tool's use since it never gave us downtime and made us lose millions.
Amazon services are very stable, and there are few problems.
Amazon's customer support is very good with a quick response time.
They provide a normal developer level of support, and within twenty-four hours for non-critical issues, which is acceptable for us.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
We'd like a dedicated account manager.
You can get a support engineer with the best qualifications.
We haven't faced any scalability issues, thanks to its integration with AWS services.
The scalability is maintained by AKS, and Route 53's scalability part is primarily involved with load balancing.
Amazon Route 53 is scalable as I use automation with YML files to handle scalability needs, and it works well.
It can scale approximately 10 percent, it is limited only by how much money you want to spend on the increase.
I rate the scalability of Cloudflare DNS a ten out of ten.
I would rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten since I didn't encounter any issues with it.
We use auto-scaling groups to manage load.
The solution is stable.
I have not experienced any outages or downtime.
I rate the stability of Cloudflare DNS a ten out of ten.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
There could be improvements in the configuration process, particularly in the options provided during setup, such as subdomain configurations and certificate management.
There is room for improvement in restricting access through one website from S3 buckets.
Error tracing could be made more intuitive.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Compared to other vendors and Cloudflare, there will be more downtime.
Route 53 is more expensive.
The pricing of Route 53 is slightly higher compared to other services, however, it is justified by its high availability and reliability.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
The price of the solution is expensive.
When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable.
I find Amazon Route 53 valuable for its ability to manage DNS records and efficiently route traffic with features like failover routing and geolocation routing.
Amazon Route 53 is beneficial for managing traffic and domain names, offering features like latency-based routing and multi-deployment options.
One of the best advantages is managed security.
The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security.
Our scenario consisted of two web servers in different allocations to control access demands, and the load balancer did the job as expected, bringing security and stability to access points.
For me, the valuable feature is DDoS protection.
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.
Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.
Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.
Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.
Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.
Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.
Cloudflare benefits
Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:
- Faster load times
- Robust DNS security
- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Free universal SSL
- Image enhancement
- Automatic browser caching
- Next-generation cloud load balancer
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Rate limiting
- Minification
- Zero-trust capabilities
- Cost-effective
- Reduced carbon footprint
Reviews from real users
“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange
“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet
“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.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company
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