As the traffic for this site is growing, I am trying to weigh on the idea if I would need to upgrade from current Cloudflare free plan to enterprise plan.
Now obviously I’m not talking about paying for the complete Enterprise plan which typically starts from $6,000+, instead there’s many alternative options out there to get Enterprise plan for a fraction of the cost.
Of course, you will lose all the customizability because you are using one pre-configured plan from these providers, but that’s fine because most of these providers have their CFE configured to suit most WordPress site.
For example, Cloudways offer CFE from $5 per domain, Kinsta have it integrated with their managed hosting plan, and you can also use Flyingproxy if you just need CFE but not hosting.
Setup Cloudflare Enterprise for Testing
In my case, I already had my own dedicated server hosting this site, that means Flyingproxy would be the option for me to get CFE, and to do the comparison.
Luckily the setup with Flyingproxy is simple, you just have to point your domain record to Flyingproxy’s Cloudflare IP, then you’re done.
Next just wait for a few minutes for it to propagate, and make sure your DNS cache is flushed, and try load up your website. You can double check if your site is serve via Flyingproxy CF by pressing F12 in your browser and check the network tab like below:
How do I test the difference?
Since Cloudflare Enterprise offered a few features such as more comprehensive WAF, image on the fly optimization, but for my test I only care about the speed, which is TTFB.
I don’t care about WAF because I already have security firewalls setup on my server side, plus a few rules in the free plan are more than sufficient.
Same goes to the image optimization, I already have my server setup to serve next gen image, and I optimize my images before I upload them to my site, so this isn’t a concern for me too.
And for that, I will be testing the /readme.html page only, and I will be comparing the TTFB of this specific text/html document between the Free and Enterprise plan.
The tool I’ll be using is Keycdn Performance Test, which it will show me the TTFB around multiple locations so it will give me a better idea how does it compare.
Before taking the results from the tool, I will first run the test for a few times, this is important to make sure I am only comparing the cached html served from edge server.
Comparing The Results: Free vs. Enterprise
For each test on Cloudflare free and enterprise, I will run the grab the results of 3 runs, and we will look at the mean, 70th percentile, 80th percentile and 90th percentile.
On the right we have Cloudflare Free and on the left it’s Cloudflare Enterprise (Flyingproxy), at first glance we can immediately see that the average TTFB on CFE is 56.11% faster than free plan.
BUT, when we look at different percentile, you may notice the difference isn’t as huge, at 70th percentile you can even see that CFE is slightly slower than free plan, why is that?
If you look into the actual test results, it’s not hard to tell because there’s outliers results from Bangalore, the TTFB on the free plan from from Bangalore is more than 400ms while on CFE it’s 10x faster.
In fact if I simply removed Bangalore from the sample, this is what it looks like:
Now there’s only 11.35% faster with CFE, and if we look into 70th and 80th percentile, CFE are actually 10% SLOWER!
This actually make sense, because we know that Cloudflare Enterprise give you access to some premium network in locations like India and China, but what surprise me is that besides of these location, there is virtually no difference in terms of performance for 90% of other locations.
If you want to check TTFB from even more location, you can use tools like Speedvitals TTFB test, which for some reason, I could not get some of the location cached when using Flyingproxy so I did not use that tool in my test.
But for my target audience which is mostly from US and Europe, I couldn’t see much differences in terms of speed performance to justify the use of CFE, plus losing some control which I can have with Cloudflare free.
Final Verdict: Do You Need Cloudflare Enterprise?
It largely depends on your use cases and if you can justify the additional cost and losing some control for the slight improvement (<50ms), but personally I would not use CFE for this website.
It does not make sense for me because:
- My target audiences isn’t in Bangalore / China or region where free plan is slow
- I do not need the WAF which I already have and my site is mostly static
- I do not need the on-the-fly image optimization (Cloudflare Polish)
- I do not have file size over 5GB that needs to be cached at edge server
- I do not gain any performance with CFE for my audiences
- I like to use various rules on my Free account
So based on above reasons, I don’t find myself have any use for CFE and would probably stay on Cloudflare Free plan for now.
The reason why I haven’t made a post about comparing Cloudflare CDN to other CDN is because most other CDN doesn’t have a readily solution for me to invalidate cache, for example BunnyCDN were in fact faster than Cloudflare Free, but invalidate cache within WordPress with BunnyCDN is almost not possible without custom coded plugin.
If anyone interested to see a comparison between Cloudflare Free and other CDN such as BunnyCDN or AWS Cloudfront, leave a comment below, and I will write another post about it.