Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

Question

Contexts -Relying on Cloudflare to be the gateway of all of our production traffics is scary.Currently we are on Enterprise plan, but we don't know if phone support is possible and email support is very slow - typically takes a few days for one reply. We have an open ticket opened ~1 month ago and they still can't answer some basic questions.Can't imagine what to do if there's big outage on their end or mistakes made by their human operators.Ideally, there's a good Cloudflare alternative, and we can easily update our dns customer server to point to that alternative when Cloudflare has outage (or caused by their human operators mistakes).

wanqu · Accepted Answer

Opportunity:Build a cloudflare alternative (some core products), and provide exceptional customer support - maybe at AWS level is acceptable.

ezekg · Answer

This is something I've looked for many times before. I actually don't want the CDN side of Cloudflare (some parts of my app are incompatible with the way their CDN works), but I do want the WAF. But Cloudflare doesn't let you disable the CDN side of their service.Anybody have alternatives to Cloudflare's WAF?

stephenr · Answer

There are a bunch of alternative CDNs, from what I found late last year there are basically zero other unmetered CDNs though - they all charge for transfer costs, so if your outbound traffic levels are high, it may be prohibitively expensive to change to an alternative CDN.

saurik · Answer

I mean, have you talked to Akamai?

wanqu · Answer

Paying a few thousand bucks annually is not enough to get no-bs customer support :)

solardev · Answer

I think Fastly offers some similar products: https://www.fastly.com/edge-cloud-network/But Cloudflare offers a lot of features/services. What specifically are you trying to find alternatives for?

llama052 · Answer

We are using Cloudflare enterprise as well and have a phone number to call, including an SLA for P1 support tickets, which I believe is 2 hours. [0]
Never had any issues with receiving solid support but our account manager has been super good. I will say there's been a lot of turnover after they went public but overall the service has been solid for our use case. (delivering terabytes of peer data and analytics a month)
Have you brought any of these issues or concerns up to your account manager? Curious if they had any ways to help.
[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/enterprise_support_sla/

CommitSyn · Answer

DDoS-Guard has many similar services.

badrabbit · Answer

Clour providers all have similar services, azure frontdoor is one example coupled with azure waf.
But honestly, no one really matches their quality of service and user interface as well as attention to detail. But a major reason to ditch them is that they may decide they hate your ip or browser just at the exact moment you need to do a critical change or troubleshoot something on their platform. The arrogance behind "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude is silly. If I can type in a legit user login with 2FA and I am a paying customer, no security control should block me at all. Google suffers from the same arrogance.
I would use CF for personal stuff but not for my business or at work.

lopkeny12ko · Answer

I've been in the industry long enough that sometimes I wonder if we have all somehow collectively forgotten about nginx whenever this question comes up.

joshxyz · Answer

have you checked bunny.net? i deployed a cdn easily on their lovely ui, would love to hear other people's experiences on it though.bunny for example doesnt have s3 storage api yet.

Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

Opportunity:
Build a cloudflare alternative (some core products), and provide exceptional customer support - maybe at AWS level is acceptable.

There are a bunch of alternative CDNs, from what I found late last year there are basically zero other unmetered CDNs though - they all charge for transfer costs, so if your outbound traffic levels are high, it may be prohibitively expensive to change to an alternative CDN.

I mean, have you talked to Akamai?

Paying a few thousand bucks annually is not enough to get no-bs customer support :)

I think Fastly offers some similar products: https://www.fastly.com/edge-cloud-network/
But Cloudflare offers a lot of features/services. What specifically are you trying to find alternatives for?

DDoS-Guard has many similar services.

I've been in the industry long enough that sometimes I wonder if we have all somehow collectively forgotten about nginx whenever this question comes up.

have you checked bunny.net? i deployed a cdn easily on their lovely ui, would love to hear other people's experiences on it though.
bunny for example doesnt have s3 storage api yet.