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  1. Stackups
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  3. CDN
  4. CDN
  5. Amazon Route 53 vs CloudFlare

Amazon Route 53 vs CloudFlare

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

CloudFlare
CloudFlare
Stacks77.2K
Followers23.1K
Votes1.8K
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53
Stacks14.5K
Followers9.4K
Votes678

Amazon Route 53 vs CloudFlare: What are the differences?

Amazon Route 53 and CloudFlare are both widely used services in the field of DNS management and domain registration. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Pricing and Billing Models: Amazon Route 53 offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where you only pay for the actual usage of the service. On the other hand, CloudFlare offers tiered pricing plans with different levels of features and performance, allowing you to choose the plan that suits your specific needs.

  2. DNS Resolution Performance: Amazon Route 53 claims to have a large global infrastructure, with multiple servers distributed across the world, resulting in low latency and fast response times. CloudFlare, on the other hand, utilizes its vast network of data centers to provide fast DNS resolution, leveraging its CDN capabilities to improve performance.

  3. Integration with Other Services: Amazon Route 53 is deeply integrated with the AWS ecosystem, allowing seamless integration with other Amazon Web Services such as EC2, S3, and CloudFront. CloudFlare, on the other hand, offers integration with various popular platforms and services, making it easier to manage DNS records and settings.

  4. Security and DDoS Protection: Security is a crucial aspect of any DNS management service, and both Amazon Route 53 and CloudFlare offer robust security features. Amazon Route 53 provides DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) support, which helps ensure the authenticity and integrity of DNS data. Additionally, Amazon Route 53 offers protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. CloudFlare, on the other hand, is renowned for its strong DDoS protection capabilities and offers additional security features like Web Application Firewall (WAF) and SSL/TLS encryption.

  5. Interface and User Experience: The user interface and overall user experience can greatly impact the ease of use and efficiency of a DNS management service. Amazon Route 53 provides a comprehensive web console with a multitude of configuration options, suitable for advanced users. CloudFlare, on the other hand, offers a user-friendly interface with a simplified setup process, making it more accessible to beginners.

  6. Managed DNS Features: When it comes to managed DNS features, Amazon Route 53 offers a wide range of options, including Alias records, health checks, and geo-routing. CloudFlare, on the other hand, provides features like Traffic Manager, which allows users to control traffic based on rules and settings.

In summary, Amazon Route 53 and CloudFlare have key differences in their pricing and billing models, DNS resolution performance, integration with other services, security and DDoS protection capabilities, user interface and experience, as well as the range of managed DNS features they offer. These differences make each service unique and suitable for different use cases and requirements.

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Advice on CloudFlare, Amazon Route 53

Eric
Eric

Service Engineer at Zix Corporation

Aug 5, 2020

Needs adviceonAmazon Route 53Amazon Route 53

We are looking for advice / best-practices / caveats about migrating off BIND on to Unbound https://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/ for internal & external (customer-facing) DNS. Is unbound suitable for this, or is it only recommended for caching? How easy or difficult is it to move 10000's of existing BIND DNS zone entries? We already use Amazon Route 53 for our AWS instances and Cloud DNS for our GCP ones, but would like to maintain internal DNS for cost, control, and latency reasons.

58.6k views58.6k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

CloudFlare
CloudFlare
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.

Amazon Route 53 is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) – such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.

CDN;WAF (Web Application Firewall);DDOS Protection;
Highly Available and Reliable – Route 53 is built using AWS’s highly available and reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of our DNS servers helps ensure a consistent ability to route your end users to your application. Route 53 is designed to provide the level of dependability required by important applications. Amazon Route 53 is backed by the Amazon Route 53 Service Level Agreement.;Scalable – Route 53 is designed to automatically scale to handle very large query volumes without any intervention from you.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Route 53 is designed to work well with other AWS features and offerings. You can use Route 53 to map domain names to your Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and other AWS resources. By using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service with Route 53, you get fine grained control over who can update your DNS data. You can use Route 53 to map your zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) to your Elastic Load Balancing instance or Amazon S3 website bucket using a feature called Alias record.;Simple – With self-service sign-up, Route 53 can start to answer your DNS queries within minutes. You can configure your DNS settings with the AWS Management Console or our easy-to-use API. You can also programmatically integrate the Route 53 API into your overall web application. For instance, you can use Route 53’s API to create a new DNS record whenever you create a new EC2 instance.;Fast – Using a global anycast network of DNS servers around the world, Route 53 is designed to automatically route your users to the optimal location depending on network conditions. As a result, the service offers low query latency for your end users, as well as low update latency for your DNS record management needs.;Cost-Effective – Route 53 passes on the benefits of AWS’s scale to you. You pay only for managing domains through the service and the number of queries that the service answers for each of your domains, at a low cost and without minimum usage commitments or any up-front fees.;Secure – By integrating Route 53 with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), you can grant unique credentials and manage permissions for every user within your AWS account and specify who has access to which parts of the Route 53 service.;Flexible – Route 53 offers Weighted Round-Robin (WRR), also known as DNS load balancing. This lets you assign weights to your DNS records that specify what portion of your traffic is routed to various endpoints.
Statistics
Stacks
77.2K
Stacks
14.5K
Followers
23.1K
Followers
9.4K
Votes
1.8K
Votes
678
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 426
    Easy setup, great cdn
  • 278
    Free ssl
  • 200
    Easy setup
  • 191
    Security
  • 181
    Ssl
Cons
  • 2
    No support for SSHFP records
  • 2
    Expensive when you exceed their fair usage limits
Pros
  • 185
    High-availability
  • 148
    Simple
  • 103
    Backed by amazon
  • 76
    Fast
  • 54
    Auhtoritive dns servers are spread over different tlds
Cons
  • 2
    Geo-based routing only works with AWS zones
  • 2
    SLOW
  • 1
    Restrictive rate limit
Integrations
CodeGuard
CodeGuard
Google Analytics
Google Analytics
GoSquared
GoSquared
Clicky
Clicky
UserVoice
UserVoice
SnapEngage
SnapEngage
Blitz
Blitz
Pingdom
Pingdom
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to CloudFlare, Amazon Route 53?

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

KeyCDN

KeyCDN

KeyCDN offers super fast and secure content delivery for minimal loading time. In addition to the CDN, it also offers advanced image processing and many other features such as live logs and Let's Encrypt SSL.

Fastly

Fastly

Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.

MaxCDN

MaxCDN

The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.

DNSimple

DNSimple

DNSimple provides the tools you need to manage your domains. We offer both a carefully crafted web interface for managing your domains and DNS records, as well as an HTTP API with various code libraries and tools. Buy, connect, operate!

jsDelivr

jsDelivr

jsDelivr is a free CDN for open source developers, with advanced features for javascript projects with access to NPM and Github It uses multiple CDN providers, resulting in the best possible uptime and performance.

Google Cloud DNS

Google Cloud DNS

Use Google's infrastructure for production quality, high volume DNS serving. Your users will have reliable, low-latency access to Google's infrastructure from anywhere in the world using our network of Anycast name servers.

Dyn

Dyn

An all-in-one Managed DNS service for your registered domain names. Dyn DNS is the perfect solution for your domain name’s DNS needs, whether it is for personal or business use. It gives you complete control over your DNS zone and its associated DNS records, complete with a simple DNS management web interface.

Moovweb XDN

Moovweb XDN

All-in-one platform to develop, deploy, preview, experiment on, monitor, and run your frontend.

DNS Made Easy

DNS Made Easy

DNS Made Easy is a subsidiary of Tiggee LLC, and is a world leader in providing global IP Anycast enterprise DNS services. DNS Made Easy is currently ranked the fastest provider for 8 consecutive months and the most reliable provider.

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