Alternatives to Cloudflare?
Everyone I know seems to be in love with Cloudflare, and then sporadically, we have issues like Cloudbleed, reported data leaks, and severe outages that simply take your site down just for using them.
Is CF overrated, or worth the occasional blips? What can I do to minimize downtime? Are there good alternatives?
They all have issues once in a while. None is really head and shoulders above the rest. We've run up to 5 CDNs at once for very large events and still had issues.
Taking a pragmatic approach the questions you need to be asking are more like "what is my actual uptime target?", "what benefit is this piece of my architecture adding?" and "is the cost (in terms of complexity if not actual money) worth it to diversify?"
Cloudflare is wildly reliable. Today's issue is a rare, but normal exception. I doubt you'll find anything more reliable.
Cloudflare combines a few tools that you would need to cobble together yourself if you wanted the same experience from another provider. E.g., if you wanted to use AWS services instead, you could stack WAF, CloudFront, and Route53 to get a firewall, CDN, and DNS provider. If you only need some of the Cloudflare stack (maybe you need a good firewall but don't care about a CDN?), then you can only use the pieces you need.
I'm not sure exactly what the reason is for the equivalent market caps, but Akamai still has about 4x the revenue, net income, employee head count, so it seems like a perfectly viable CDN. I don't personally have a choice with what I'm working on. I work for the Air Force, and they use Akamai.
Not advocating one or the other. Everything has outages. But Cloudflare is clearly not the only option out there. I think they just seem like it in solo dev/startup spaces like this because they have historically had the most extensive free tier in their industry sector.
There’s a few other WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) knocking around. Russia Today uses DDOSGuard due to the Ukraine crisis. If it’s a CDN you want there are plenty of alternatives, e.g Fastly, Bunny, Cloudfront, Stackpath etc
For simpler cdn stuff I do like bunny. Nowhere near cf on feature set but it does what it says on tin
What exactly are you using Cloudflare for?
maybe do a double cdn, both cloudflare and fastly. if one goes down the other is up.
other providers with an offering like workers+r2 would be great for the market.
For what, DNS, Firewall, CDN?