Item: Cloudflare
Rating: 10
Author: Jason Janes

Overall Satisfaction with Cloudflare

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cloudflare is used to manage all company domains with no exceptions. All DNS functions are set up within Cloudflare including but not limited to IPs for Web pages, mail settings (SPF, DKIM), CNAME white label services, etc.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Instant Deployment of new IP address (ie moving a website to a new host).
Caching (storing copies of information, images, etc to improve user experience).
Denial of Service Attack Prevention.
HTTPS redirects for ALL urls.

Cons

Cloudflare is great, unbelievable value even at free level.
Paid plans offer even more features at a very fair price point.
Very few things to improve upon.
The only thing that comes to mind that Cloudflare could approve upon is Domain management features could be more robust.

Return on Investment

Massive timesaver moving IP addresses with no downtime.
Manage all things DNS from one central location, no data silos.
Instant deployment of DOS (Denial of Service) attacks.

Alternatives Considered

I've used Cloudflare almost since the beginning, 8+ years. I don't have any experience with other platforms as Cloudflare is simple, easy, and cost-effective. Cloudflare offers tremendous value in its free plan. The vast majority of our clients are on the free plan but for some larger clients who require more advanced features, Cloudflare is still extremely affordable for the feature sets it delivers in its advanced offerings.

Onboarding

Easy Peasy. Setup is actually quite painless with a relatively minor learning curve. The help section is quite extensive and almost always has the answer you are looking for.

Support Rating

Extensive help section which nearly always has the answer you are looking for. On a few rare occasions in 8+ years, I wasn't able to find a solution and used the email support feature (on the free plan) and the response time was a little slower than I would prefer but it's really hard to complain considering it wasn't a paid account. With paid plans, the support response times decrease significantly based on your level of service which clearly makes sense as live support can be costly.

Key Insights

Do you think Cloudflare delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cloudflare's feature set?

Yes

Did Cloudflare live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cloudflare go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cloudflare again?

Yes

Other Software Used

WordPress, Flywheel, Kinsta, Close, CloudApp

Likelihood to Recommend

I can't think of a single scenario where Cloudflare isn't useful. Our company uses Cloudflare for ALL sites. In fact, as a Web Development Agency, we don't work with clients unless they allow us to use Cloudflare. It's really that good ;-) and necessary for modern websites and apps.

Evaluating Cloudflare and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - DNS management at Registrar level (ie GoDaddy, NameCheap, etc). We strongly recommend an approach of not keeping all your eggs in one basket. Registrar is used for registering domains only. Cloudflare to manage DNS and mail, separate hosting, and enterprise-level mail solution like Google Workplace or Microsoft 365.

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation
Prior Experience with the Product

An incredible amount of features at great price points including a great free tier.

Comments

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Simply the Best. Incredible value on Free Plan and Paid Plans are very affordable