Cloudflare Reviews

I use Cloudflare for legacy websites that I need to protect because they're very vulnerable or to secure a client's critical websites. We will implement it after a review or if the website has gotten a poor grade on one of those online checks to see if the security meets the minimum requirements. 

Usually, after I show them their website is vulnerable, I get them to sign up immediately. For me, it's more of a delta suspender as a security measure. I find that many web developers do a poor job of updating their websites and keeping all the security modules.

Cloudflare has a server, and you point your DNS there. From there, you either enable the passthrough or use their full proxy. When you use their full proxy, you get all the features. If you're only doing the DNS, it's just a basic DNS server. Most people don't use it just for DNS; they use it for proxying their websites. You can proxy other services as well, but I've only used it for web applications on different ports.

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, okay?

It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal. 

I have been using Cloudflare for several years.

Cloudflare is highly stable.

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive.

Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions.

Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

It depends on the level of support. Basic Cloudflare support is average. Enterprise support is amazing. It's 10 out of 10. However, if you're paying $20, you get email-based support. 

Cloudflare is effortless to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working. You enable the proxy and SSL. The website is protected within 10 or 15 minutes. The biggest wait is for the internet to see that the DNS has changed. I always do the initial setup myself and then give it to one of my web guys to manage. There's a reason behind I do it that way. When ordering a client, I generally manage their DNS, email, and other services. I don't want to let the web developer mess it up.

The web developers know how to do it but don't have a stake in it like I do. If they flip a switch and forget to update the FPF or TXT records, and other essential documents start to break, it's a problem. I don't trust them to do the setup. Other than that, I let them have access. I let the web developers have access because they need to make changes. They're going to add host entries, etc., and they may want to adjust some of the features in Cloudflare.

I'm not a web expert. I have expertise in infrastructure, server planning, and SQL. I can support the whole picture, but I'm not a web expert. You don't need a web expert to do it. You can get a generalist like me, and I have many specific skills. However, I don't do that every day, and you don't have to touch it daily. In a lot of ways, it's a set-it-and-forget-it kind of deal.

The solution requires some primary care and feeding for performance problems and functionality issues, like if something doesn't work because it's a bad link. I engage with the web developer to determine if it's a problem with caching, the code, filter configuration, etc. We look at all the different features. That may require some effort. However, if you don't make any changes to the website, you might only touch it twice a year after it's configured. 

I have some clients whose sites don't do anything. It's like a virtual business card. For those sites, I give them the lowest common denominator of Cloudflare set up for that domain. The website is protected and much less likely to get hacked.

However, if I have a company that has online sales and sends out many newsletters, then they need to have a CDN. That way, if a thousand people get that email and click it at once, it will not kill their server. That's the value of having Cloudflare or something similar. It's different if a thousand people click on a server farm in one location. 

Even at AWS, you have to have this auto-scaling, and the configuration is significant. I would get paid thousands of dollars to set that up. That costs a fortune in monthly payments. I don't know of any of these different companies that host servers. I just put the website on Cloudflare, and they don't spend much money on my time. Maybe I should be smarter and push the AWS, so I get paid more.

It could range from free to $1,500 a month. I put all my clients on Cloudflare, so it's around 20 or 30 customers. One of my clients has more than two dozen domains on Cloudflare, so they pay $20 times 20 domains. He's paying $400 a month. It isn't cheap, but it's totally worth it.

I rate CloudFlare 10 out of 10. I couldn't recommend it more strongly. If you have a website, you need to use Cloudflare or something like it. Don't leave your website unprotected. That's my advice. I set up Cloudflare for every client that wants to host a website because it protects their site and makes it easier for me to manage the DNS. 

I get them to pay the $20 for it. That's the bare minimum. If you want something that can enhance the security of your website, just do Cloudflare. I always do it. I mean, I'm always going to add to my Cloudflare base. I'm never going to shrink unless I find something better. But I don't know of any other solutions that.

You can do a self-sign. That's a couple hundred dollars a year that you don't have to spend, and you don't have to manage that. You can lock down your security on your website so that only the Cloudflare data centers can access your web server. You're limiting a lot of risks.

Let's say you're hosting your site on GoDaddy. GoDaddy's server is unprotected. It's just a server out there. They have enterprise IDS and all that other stuff, but for the most part, they're vulnerable. People attack them all the time. You can limit that by only allowing access to your website from Cloudflare servers. Cloudflare stands in front of your servers as a firewall. That increases performance and security. It limits a lot of access to your servers. 

There are so many benefits here. You don't need SSL on your site, which is excellent, because you don't have to pay for that certificate. That makes it a lot easier. Troubleshooting your site for problems and not having SSL enabled between you and Cloudflare is huge. 

We monitor traffic on Cloudflare, and we have some applications that we download on Cloudflare. We have ten to twenty gigs per country.

Our customers are residential ISP customers with high traffic because of Google apps, Amazon network peering, and Direct TV, so we use Cloudflare for the customers. For example, we announce all traffic or customer traffic to the BDP station, and Cloudflare works by caching the content, and the servers send the content to our clients.

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.

It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare.

In the next release of Cloudflare, it would be good if it could give more information about applications, particularly which ones still need improvement.

Cloudflare is a stable solution. At first, my company had a graphics-related problem during the POC stage, but after that, my company didn't experience any issues with Cloudflare. The Cloudflare connection is stable.

Cloudflare is a scalable solution. The process to scale it is clear, and the Cloudflare team will contact you to check if you want to scale up.

The technical support for Cloudflare is good because the team is knowledgeable about the connection, standard, special configurations, etc. My team had no problems double-checking configurations with the Cloudflare technical support team.

We didn't use a different solution apart from Cloudflare.

The initial setup for Cloudflare is easy because you only have to connect it to your private cloud based on your requirements. I didn't experience any issues connecting the tool.

In my company, deploying Cloudflare required a lot of equipment, so it took four to five days to complete the deployment, but there was no problem with the process.

In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers.

My company has different computing tools in Colombia, Miami, South America, Brazil, and Chile, such as Akamai, Cloudflare, CDN, and Google Playbook.

I have hands-on experience with Akamai, Twitch, and Cloudflare.

My company is a Cloudflare customer.

Three engineers handle the deployment and maintenance of Cloudflare within my company. The NOC team monitors the cluster, and if there's any issue, my team checks the port, and the engineers review the patch to see if it's okay. If the problem remains, my team escalates to the Operations team responsible for looking into the issue more closely. Within two hours, the Operations team contacts my team about the resolution.

I'd recommend Cloudflare to other companies because it helps monitor traffic.

My rating for Cloudflare is a ten out of ten because it's a helpful tool, and I didn't find anything wrong with it.

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.

We primarily use the solution for security purposes. We use the product for theft and DDoS protection.

The security on offer is good. Specifically, the DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

The solution can scale if you need it to. It has the capability to expand.

The product seems to be pretty stable overall.

The technical support is very good. They are knowledgeable and they respond quickly.

It would be ideal if the product had some sort of live tracking functionality available to us.

The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it.

I've been using the solution for about two or so years at this point. It's been a while.

I've never really evaluated the stability of the solution. I have no opinion of it. I can't speak to its overall performance very well. Generally, however, I would say that it is largely stable.

The solution doesn't really depend on the number of users, so much as the general traffic. In that sense, it can scale. It's a pretty scalable product.

The technical support on offer is excellent. They are very helpful and responsive. We're quite happy with the level of service they provide to their customers.

The initial setup was neither simple nor complex. It was somewhere in the middle, However, we did have help with the implementation, which was very useful for us.

The deployment took about 11 days in total. It wasn't too long.

Once it is deployed, there is no maintenance required of us. 

The vendor helped us with the initial implementation. We had a good experience with them overall.

The solution is relatively expensive. It's not something that comes at a cheap price.

We are just a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We are using the latest version of the solution currently. I can't speak to the exact version number, however.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall. We've been quite happy with its capabilities.

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. 

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.

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.

Generally, I am satisfied with this product.

We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship.

Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution. 

They are creating every week now and developing new products. They are on the right track.

I wouldn't say I want to add anything just yet. While I am attempting to become an MSP, I would like to have access to my clients who are using the product.

An MSP is essentially a corporation that resells a product and wants to provide support and first-level service to its consumers.

Access to the solution's dashboards is not intended for a service company. You are practically blind, and to validate a problem, you must view the customer's screen.

It's not like other systems where you can go into the back dashboard and see what the consumer sees and then alleviate the problem.

To provide help, you must first discover how to gain access to the information.

It is inconvenient.

According to what I hear, they are working on it and will get there gradually.

I have been working with Cloudflare for approximately four years.

Cloudflare is stable, however, its global performance could be better. 

They have a few hiccups here and there, but for a startup, that's to be expected.

Technical support is responsive.

It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level. 

There are rivals on the market who provide the same solution at a lesser cost.

We are partners with Cloudflare.

I would rate Cloudflare an eight out of ten.