Stackpath review

I was happy using Cloudflare Free but free does not offer any WAF. When I first signed up with Cloudflare they used to have these plans that start from $20 for first site and $5 per site thereafter. It made a lot of sense. But now it is $20 per site. Which is still ok unless you have 50 domains and most of them are wordpress or php placeholder sites from domain acquisitions.

I had heard of Stackpath and their pricing tier made sense for my use case. They go by bandwidth though, so if you need a lot of bandwidth stick with Cloudflare.

TL;DR with Stackpath you pay 100$ for 50 sites and it does work with Vanity domains/hostnames which are counted as one site. So its about $2 per site per month. That’s quite good to be honest. Especially if you are a reseller, you can add Stackpath for your customers quite easily.

Pros:

• Easy out of the box configuration.
• Ready to go WAF works great.
• Country Blocking included (extra charges everywhere else)
• Based on Nginx plus, you can write your own rules as you would on NGinx proxies for e.g.
• Good POPs in Asia
• Ability to do awesome stuff like force Edge Captcha on certain URLs through custom rules. Stop spam registrations and login attempts.
• Best support I have seen so far, not surprising as MaxCDN (now Stackpath) had the same great support.

Cons:

• WAF rules are too simplistic and seem to be CRS 1.0 so it’s either on or off and not scoring based. Might be limiting. I couldn’t figure out how to write a rule condition that matches multiple URL.
• No SSL auto provisioning (Let’s Encrypt or Shared SSL) you must manually rotate your certificates.
• No HTML/base page caching
• No route acceleration.
• no DNS

All being said, the Cons aren’t as big of a deal except the DNS and base page caching. You need a DNS provider and Stackpath also recommends Cloudflare. Cloudflare DNS support CNAME on TLD through Flattening which Route53 doesn’t seem to support (only for AWS stuff, you can use ANAME)

One weird thing is that Stackpath has high cache ejection rates so YMMV.

Edit 1: Your support experience will vary depending on which timezone you hit it at, if you use chat. If your really need technical help, contact the chat as PST working hours. At other hours I have had mixed results from between as good as “A robot could do your job” to “excellent” in rare cases. Just in case, you come upon this review here and think it’s not what you experienced, I totally get it.