Cloudways has relentlessly prioritized quality, performance, and security on our managed web hosting platform.
We proved our commitment to user satisfaction when we announced our latest partnership with Cloudflare back in 2022, which opened up enterprise-grade security and performance to agencies, web professionals, and SMBs of all sizes.
We’ve only continued to make our partnership with Cloudflare better over the years. Recently, we introduced Edge Page Caching, Argo Smart Routing, and much more.
Let’s discuss what benefits you get with the Cloudways Cloudflare Enterprise Add-on if you’re looking for a hosting solution with built-in Cloudflare. We’ll also look at the newly launched features that we added to the Cloudways Cloudflare Enterprise Add-on to make it even better.
Brief Overview of Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a highly popular DNS platform that offers a wide range of services, including DNS management, exceptional speed, advanced security features, and optimizations.
With its free plan, users can benefit from a free SSL certificate to secure their websites, DNS management, and a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for accelerated content delivery to various locations.
Beyond the free plan, Cloudflare provides various paid plans with additional advantages. The Cloudflare Enterprise plan is the most premium option, with monthly costs ranging from $1000 to $5000.
However, our partnership with Cloudflare allows us to offer the same Enterprise plan with all its features for just $4.99/month per website.
Why Cloudways Partnered With Cloudflare?
As helpful as the Cloudways CDN (StackPath) add-on solution we used to offer in the past, it failed to meet our expectations in terms of quality and performance over time.
Several incidents, including the unavailability of the service during a critical peak period, such as Black Friday-Cyber Monday, convinced us we needed to quickly find a reliable alternative. Customer feedback also requested increased security, especially protection against hackers and DDoS attacks.
Therefore, after a thorough evaluation by our engineering team and an extended beta testing period inviting users to try the service, we decided to partner with Cloudflare, an innovator with the strongest product and strategy in cloud-edge technology.
Cloudflare was named a 2020 “Customer’s Choice” for CDN and WAF in Gartner Peer Insights and is the leading cloud edge development platform according to Forrester’s Q4 2021 evaluation.
Cloudflare has also recently received an award where it has been acknowledged as the Only New Vendor to Be Recognized in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE).
Try Out Cloudflare Enterprise for Better Performance and Security!
Cloudflare Enterprise offers advanced tools for businesses that prefer performance and security over anything.
Enterprise-Grade CDN and Performance
A fast and efficient online presence is crucial for any business’s success. With 47% of users expecting webpages to load in 2 seconds or less, simply having a website is not enough.
Whether you run a Digital Marketing Agency, a blogging website, or an e-commerce store, your website’s performance and user experience are key to your success.
Enterprise-Grade CDN offers a strong network of edge servers and additional features that can take your website to new heights of speed. This is something free CDNs lack.
Cloudflare’s Edge Page Caching takes your already fast website on Cloudways to new heights of speed. It caches your entire web page at Cloudflare’s edge servers in 275+ locations worldwide, resulting in lightning-fast load times for WordPress websites.
This is much faster than partial caching (a limitation of the free version), which only stores specific content and still requires fetching data from the primary server.
With Edge Page Caching, our testing shows an average of 66% faster load times than partial caching with our Cloudflare Enterprise add-on.
Cloudways’ Cloudflare Add-on: New and Improved
Since roughly 9K users use the Cloudways Cloudflare Enprise Add-on, we were compelled to improve it. So, after an extensive Q&A process, we have announced new features (see performance benchmarks) that have been added to the Cloudflare add-on. Users can now fully access and benefit from our latest enhancements, such as:
- Edge Page Caching
- Argo Smart Routing
- Purge API
- Features control
- Enhanced Security with Global Rate Limiting & the Honey Pot Project
Customer Reviews of Cloudways’ Cloudflare Add-on
Learn how our customers are benefiting from the new features of our Cloudflare Enterprise Add-on!
This website, while considerably fast, had a GTMetrix grade of C, but after deploying Cloudflare’s Enterprise CDN and moving to Cloudways hosting, we saw a significant improvement in performance.
The website’s speed increased, and we were able to achieve a GTMetrix grade of A.
The page load speed is significantly faster now!
Slye Joy Serrano
Managing Director @ContentHackerCo
Thought I’d make a nice post about Cloudways for once 🙂
Their Cloudflare Enterprise integration after the last big update rocks. I don’t think anyone else has these features on the market, and it is just so easy to use. The alternative is rather complex and expensive. The only thing I’d love them to add is rules.
I’m not saying that you should or should not use the new Cloudflare integration. All I’m saying is that I went from a D to an A today; this is the only change I made.
Cloudflare Beta Test – What Our Customers Had to Say When We First Introduced the Cloudflare Enterprise Add-On!
“Cloudways has made it possible to effortlessly activate Enterprise-grade security and performance on a per-application basis at a fraction of the cost. With their Cloudflare partnership and already top-tier support, our clients can rest easy knowing that we’ve got their back.”
Elliott Mangham
Founder & Director, Code Resolution
“Bringing powerful tools and scalable hosting infrastructure to everyone is something Cloudways gets right every time. The Cloudflare Enterprise integration once again brings us industry-leading and otherwise unattainable security and performance gains, at a price every business, agency, or freelancer can afford.”
Paul Lacey
WordPress & Digital Designer
Cloudflare Enterprise Add-on Benefits
Let’s now look at the benefits of Cloudflare hosting and how it helps your business with maximum performance and security.
Enterprise-Grade DDoS and Firewall Protection
The loss of customer confidence and revenue can be a devastating consequence of downtime for a company. But it’s one that’s easily prevented by Cloudflare’s enterprise-grade mitigation of DDoS attacks against layers 3, 4, & 7.
This comes with reserved IPs for Cloudways, whose traffic is routed and prioritized over all other traffic on the Cloudflare network. This is a feature you can’t find on any other free or paid plan of Cloudflare hosting.
WAF, an intelligent web application firewall, updates itself with the most recently discovered threats by analyzing 32 million requests per second and millions of websites. WAF identifies & blocks attackers at the edge before they reach your server.
It also comes with firewall rules (including OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set) that allow us at Cloudways to make configurations specifically for protecting your WordPress sites, Magento stores, and more.
In the end, you get a managed intelligent firewall for your application with zero effort from your side. Combined with the free wildcard SSLs issued for your domains, you also achieve compliance with PCI DSS 3.2 standards.
Enterprise-Grade CDN and Performance
The Cloudflare Enterprise version of its CDN comes with dedicated IPs. Compared to the regular CDN traffic of the free or other paid plans on Cloudflare, it prioritizes routing to ensure maximum speed.
In addition, Argo-tiered caching uses regional Tier 1 Cloudflare data centers to propagate content, which minimizes static content requests to your server and reduces costs. Tier 1 infrastructure is self-optimized, resilient, and non-disruptive to better serve enterprise-level needs.
“By integrating with Cloudflare, Cloudways allows companies to access strong performance capabilities to deliver better user experience and optimized speed. Its enterprise add-on maximizes CDN output to provide higher performance and availability for web hosting… Overall, the Cloudflare enterprise add-on can greatly benefit personal users and companies looking to boost performance and strengthen their security measures through simplified use.”
Lynn Cadet
Tech Writer for HostingAdvice.com
Comparing Cloudflare Free vs Enterprise Add-on
Here are the features you get with the Free vs Enterprise plan of Cloudflare hosting.
- 100GB Enterprise CDN
- Edge Page Caching NEW
- Argo Smart Routing NEW
- Argo Tiered Caching
- Priority DDoS protection
- Intelligent firewall (WAF)
- Global Rate Limiting NEW
- The Honey Pot Project NEW
- Image optimization with Cloudflare Polish
- Brotli compression
- Mobile optimization with Mirage
- Wildcard SSL support
- PCI DSS compliance
- HTTP/3 support
- Reserved for Cloudways IPs & prioritized routing
Cloudflare Enterprise Add-on Pricing
At a starting price of $4.99 per domain, cost should not be a barrier for users to join. In addition, we’ve introduced volume discounts that drop the price down to $1.99 per domain, meaning your costs can remain low even if you activate the add-on for hundreds of applications. Agencies and developers will find that upselling this feature to end customers can generate healthy recurring revenue.
Activating and Managing Cloudflare Add-on
Staying true to our core value of freedom of choice, Cloudflare Enterprise is an optional user add-on. Activation on the Cloudways platform is a simple matter that follows a quick domain validation, with little variation depending on your current CDN and DNS provider.
The remaining security and performance-enhancing features will work on the fly, with no additional configuration from your side. In our detailed guide, you can find detailed instructions on configuring the Cloudflare add-on.
Management Features
Caching Mode – You are able to easily enable and disable cache with a click. You might need to bypass the cached content saved on the CDN to quickly check if your recent design changes look good on the live website.
Purge Cache – You don’t have to wait for the CDN’s predetermined cache expiry time to push your website changes to visitors. As soon as you purge your cache, your updated content is served, and the CDN will cache a fresh copy from your site’s hosting server.
Transfer CDN – Imagine you are building a new website for an existing hosting at Cloudways with Cloudflare Enterprise from scratch. When you are ready to go live, you can simply transfer Cloudflare Enterprise from the old application to the new one without changing DNS records and IPs.
Edge Page Cache – At the moment, our add-on offers a static cache by default (website images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.). For WooCommerce and WordPress, we are working on releasing caching of dynamic pages (e.g., cart or checkout) in the following months, so you have more control over page rules and dynamic content is served faster and more accurately. We will notify you as soon as this feature goes live.
As always, if you think we are missing a feature or have something to share with us, please reach out in the comments section below.
Cloudways’ Cloudflare Add-on: Misconceptions Cleared
The Cloudways Cloudflare Enterprise Add-on is a legit thing. But we do understand that it does seem too good to be true.
In fact, we often see people confused and believing there is no way they can get the Enterprise Add-on and all its features for so cheap.
Just look at this Reddit comment:
The truth is, the Cloudflare Enterprise Add-on on its own is super expensive. However, with Cloudways, you can get it for just $4.99/mo.
The Cloudways Cloudflare Enterprise Add-on offers extreme value for money. There is no question about it. And we’re continuing to make it even better by adding new features like:
- Edge Page Caching – (NEW)
- Argo Smart Routing – (NEW)
- Global Rate Limiting – (NEW)
- The Honey Pot Project – (NEW)
Ready to experience the difference? Try out the Cloudflare Enterprise add-on today & experience the revolution in your website’s performance and security. As always, we are here to provide support and answer any questions you may have.
Marianna Siouti
Marianna Siouti is a Product Marketing Manager at Cloudways. She has over 14 years of experience in the hosting industry, in Marketing and Product. She is someone who falls in love with problems and works towards solving them with technology. You will find her working remotely from warm places, or on LinkedIn.
