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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs IIS PHP Windows comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (16th), API Security (8th)
IIS PHP Windows
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Application Server (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

F5 Distributed Cloud Services and IIS PHP Windows aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. F5 Distributed Cloud Services is designed for CDN and holds a mindshare of 2.3%, up 1.7% compared to last year.
IIS PHP Windows, on the other hand, focuses on Application Server, holds 0.9% mindshare.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Distributed Cloud Services2.3%
Cloudflare14.7%
Akamai11.3%
Other71.7%
CDN
Application Server Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IIS PHP Windows0.9%
Tomcat12.8%
Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP)9.8%
Other76.5%
Application Server
 

Featured Reviews

Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management
F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.
Gaurav-Bansal - PeerSpot reviewer
Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Hosting client blogs has become straightforward but resource usage still needs improvement
IIS PHP Windows has positively impacted my organization by helping to deploy customer websites that have very small budgets, allowing the organization to assist those clients, which builds trust with them. It enables the organization to help them run their small websites, and while some clients had bigger projects, they also wanted their small websites to run, such as a personal blog. Client satisfaction was high because a Windows server can be monitored, and the customer's websites could remain up and running all the time. If something happens and the application crashes, we could simply grab the logs from the event viewer to check memory limits and investigate what is happening. Additionally, the client could perform some of the management using the GUI management interface in IIS.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Elastic environments are the most valuable features because I can pull these apps and migrate the on-premises environment to the Distributed Cloud environment, and this capability is very strong and the security regarding the apps is really very powerful."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve my traffic management efficiency overall because it is cheaper than Silverline."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"I appreciate the UI of F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the backend cost, alongside the actual value proposition that they provide with the load balancer, which is excellent."
"In my opinion, the best features F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers are that the complexity is very low, it is simple to use and gives the opportunity to do whatever I want, basically."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."
"IIS PHP Windows has positively impacted my organization by helping to deploy customer websites that have very small budgets, allowing the organization to assist those clients, which builds trust with them."
"If you want to host your PHP or Laravel-based application in Windows, you can definitely use this extension, and using this extension you can host your PHP or Laravel application in IIS and it will have super speed."
"In my experience, the best features IIS PHP Windows offers include allowing us to host the PHP application with better performance compared to XAMPP, which we were previously using because XAMPP was giving slow performance."
"IIS PHP Windows impacts my organization positively because my applications perform very well here when compared with XAMPP."
 

Cons

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."
"One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services still does not have the same flexibility as BIG-IP. It does not have iRules."
"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."
"I would evaluate F5 technical support as not particularly fast in replying, but it is effective."
"The worst experience is that with so many solutions available, it is very complicated to know all of the solution modules, and the offers from F5 Distributed Cloud Services are vast."
"I chose a rating of seven out of ten because IIS PHP Windows is good for small enterprises with manageable aspects, but it has very high resource usage and requires a Windows server license, contributing to the overall cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Construction Company
45%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Healthcare Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced.Specifically, the confidence level on API security that F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
My main use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services is WAF protection.I am using F5 Distributed Cloud Services primarily for securing my infrastructure with layer 7 protection, which F5 provides. Th...
What needs improvement with IIS PHP Windows?
IIS PHP Windows can be improved regarding its higher resource usage. Unlike a Linux web server that is very lightweight, the resource usage is higher on Windows. I chose a rating of seven out of te...
What is your primary use case for IIS PHP Windows?
My main use case for IIS PHP Windows is to deploy it for WordPress websites and Laravel custom applications so they can run on IIS using the PHP provider and PHP version. I used IIS PHP Windows for...
What advice do you have for others considering IIS PHP Windows?
Regarding IIS PHP Windows' security, I think its governance and security are solid as long as you configure Windows Active Directory correctly and all Windows authentication so that no other users ...
 

Overview

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