I'm VP, Product Engineering at https://www.stackpath.com and we feel like our products compete nicely alongside Cloudflare in DNS, WAF, CDN and Serverless (our EdgeEngine product uses v8 just like Cloudflare workers).

Our Edge Containers product launch was also on HN last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19089614

Hi,

I am a user of MaxCDN (which was bought by Stackpath) and on every page you write "Everything customers loved about MaxCDN has been integrated into the StackPath CDN Edge Service" which isn't true and just marketing speech.

MaxCDN had an API called the "raw logs api" that let my service query yours to get an understanding of what requests you have served for us, but that feature is missing with Stackpath, the feature is described here: https://reseller-docs.maxcdn.com/#raw-logs-api

Hi,

This is super helpful, really appreciate it. I will say that this feature along with reporting delivery by file is among the top feature requests on the new SP// platform.

We do have the ability to provide you with access logs, but it's not as convenient as the API above.

We also have several users creating real-time CDN logs with our Serverless EdgeEngine so that's an option as well.

Anyways, I've noted your request around the raw logs API going to the new platform and will be sure to stay on top of it.

Feel free to email me anytime, always happy to help - ben.gabler (at) stackpath (dot) com

When it comes to bandwidth, you can't really compete with Cloudflare.

Your $200/month plan gives us 10TB. I've served over 50TB on Cloudflare's $20/month plan, which probably makes me a "bad customer", but it's nice not having to worry about this when someone decides to use a direct link to a video or image I host.

They don't allow video streaming on their regular plans. How are you able to serve up videos on the $20/month plan?

Cloudflare works as a reverse proxy, it loads what's on your server. We can cache videos by using a page rule.

I guess they only ask you to upgrade if you serve a huge amount of bandwidth.

I've talked with your sales teams a couple of times about tag-based purging, which is the one Varnish/Fastly feature I cannot live without.

I understand it isn't implemented on one of them (MaxCDN IIRC) and StackPath does not provide pricing suited for smaller projects (where the traffic is GBs/month, but the speed gain from caching dynamic content is the reason for using a CDN).

I'd be more than happy to work with you on this. I run Product & Software here at SP// so I know the right people ;) feel free to email me ben.gabler (at) stackpath (dot) com

Failover is a major difference I find between Cloudflare and Stackpath. Just a WAF with more options for failover or load balancing would put things on equal footing. This was based on my last trial back in November.

It'd be great to understand a bit more about how you'd like to see this working. The WAF product team report into me so I can get a discussion going with the right people if you'd like to email me: [email protected]

Fastly? Akamai?

Pretty good competition.

[1] https://www.fastly.com

[2] https://www.akamai.com

> Pretty good competition.

Not when it comes to pricing.

Both have better networks and features though. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

Cloudflare is the Heroku of the CDN space. They are easy to setup, they give away free or cheap accounts to get people on their service. Once a company gets big and starts having real traffic they move off of Cloudflare to a better provider.

Akamai isn't competing with Cloudflare on price, much like The French Laundry isn't competing with McDonalds on price.

Fastly has a very comparable network to CloudFlare:

https://imgur.com/a/rTyV6e5

CloudFlare’s $200/month plan is the best CDN per $ money can buy.

Once you get into “Enterprise”, then you should move somewhere else as they stop being competitive.

Fastly has been wonderful to work with. Excellent support, being able to write VCL and deploy it to the edge has been great, and the network is fast and reliable. Also haven't had a Heartbleed type event yet.

But that's not what it means to have competition.

Walmart is still Amazon's competitor, despite being much cheaper in many cases.

Do they have a WAF? Fastly seems to have one in limited availability at least...

* https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp

* https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-applicati...

Not saying they are better than Cloudflare. I use Cloudflare myself. But they are good alternatives.

I too was curious about competitors so I searched and found the following (there are lots more). Granted some of these probably don't overlap perfectly with CF, but they do offer at least "hosted dns":

https://cloud.google.com/dns/

https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/premium-dns

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/dns/

https://dyn.com/dns/managed-dns/

https://www.namecheap.com/domains/freedns/ (free option)

Cloudflare's DNS is probably the least exciting aspect of their product. The real value add is in their proxy/CDN, which is pretty difficult to compete with.

The cloud services all have their own CDN/Proxies/WAFs - AWS has Cloudfront, Azure has edge cdn etc.

None of those services is offering a low-hassle, free CDN & proxy for smaller sites. Nobody offers one for free anywhere on earth that is of the quality and scale that Cloudflare offers. That's what lured so many sites to their service so quickly in a very competitive landscape. If you've got a site that needs $0.50 per month in CDN service, they give it to you for free, along with various other benefits included at no cost. You can throw a cheap, low traffic site (or 20 of them) onto Cloudflare and never worry about cost (whether on the CDN side or otherwise), period. It's an immense cost benefit for lower traffic sites.

I haven't tried namecheap DNS recently, but I used to use it. I hated DNS. It would just take hours and hours for any change to propagate, regardless of TTL and it was just extremely painful to work with. I thought this was just the way DNS was, until I switched to cloudflare. Suddenly, new records appeared instantly and changes applied in seconds or minutes it felt like pure magic.

So, that's my review of Namecheap freeDNS. I suppose they make it bad on purpose so people upgrade to their premium DNS?

+1 love namecheap but DNS would regularly fail esp "v2"

I’ve been using namecheaps free DNS work in recent weeks and it propagated super quickly (2 or 3 minutes, I used a dns checker to see and various hosts around the globe all saw the changes).

For my own stuff, I use digitalocean for hosting so use their nameservers for DNS.

I'd suggest Cloudflare's main product is the WAF / DDoS protection / concealment, the CDN is a nice plus of course but as soon as you start to really use it they ask you to upgrade anyway.

It is also the most dangerous if they become the only dominant player. They could theoretically prevent any Google competitors from popping up.

Are they even close to becoming the dominant player? Most startups I know use fastly or CloudFront. The big players all use Akamai. I read somewhere that Akamai serves 350 of the top 500 ecommerce sites in the US.

For DNS there's also https://ns1.com/ .

They appear to skip directly from a free tier to "Contact us for pricing". That does not inspire confidence.

I found the enterprise pricing quickly when I wanted CDN inside China.

DNS is a sideline for CF, it's the DDOS-resistant CDN that people choose them for.

I agree. I do love some of what CloudFlare does, and they definitely contribute back to networking infrastructure in ways I wish other companies did and that's why I'm not entirely against them. Competition is healthy definitely. I do appreciate what they're doing with Go as well given that they've contributed code to Go itself (iirc).

For us it came down to supporting various technologies we need for our application and a few extra that we are actively using.

1. mTLS 2. Websockets 3. Bot Mitigation (credential stuffing) 4. Workers

We need mTLS and Websocket support. Other providers in the space may support one but not the other which is a problem.

Curious to learn about your websocket CDN needs. Mind elaborating on the use case.

The CDN aspect isn't really vital to our application or business needs at this time. We really liked the security aspect more and we could check off quite a few boxes without having to build that ourselves, ie, IPRM, WAF, DDOS.

Websockets was a requirement in the application at that time and of course we knew we we needed to remove it as a dependency and we have for the most part.

CloudFlare's free service basically keeps any competitors from up and coming. Plenty of techies use it for personal sites and projects. It then later drives their decision to use the paid tiers for more businessy things.

AWS Cloudfront

Pricing.

Cloudflare is what Digital Ocean is compare to AWS. Akamai is better for example.

I spent a decent part of last year testing various CDNs and this is not what I found. Cloudflare, Verizon were both better (performance, cache retention) than Akamai based on my testing. And cheaper, not even considering the cost of features that you'd have to buy from Akamai to make it a feature-equal comparison.

Performance testing for CDN is difficult, I'm not sure how accurate your tests were. It depends on many many parameters.