As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.)
Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switched. I just tested and Cloudflare is still taking 48ms their own DNS server to resolve our Cloudflare-hosted DNS, but only 14ms for Fastly to establish a connection and send the first byte.
That speed does make a difference. When we switched from Cloudflare to Fastly we had about a 7% increase in completed sales.
I think their ROI is still too low for most small businesses, the only way that actually makes sense for us is because it's free for open source/nonprofits. But I can imagine it's a big deal for larger ones.
Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switched. I just tested and Cloudflare is still taking 48ms their own DNS server to resolve our Cloudflare-hosted DNS, but only 14ms for Fastly to establish a connection and send the first byte.
That speed does make a difference. When we switched from Cloudflare to Fastly we had about a 7% increase in completed sales.
I think their ROI is still too low for most small businesses, the only way that actually makes sense for us is because it's free for open source/nonprofits. But I can imagine it's a big deal for larger ones.