Question

Should I use CloudFlare Load Balancer or DigitalOcean Load Balancer?

Is it better for the load balancer to be next to droplets in DigitalOcean or to CloudFlare (which manages the DNS of my domain)?

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Ryan Quinn
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
• May 21, 2018
Accepted Answer

These two products provide some differing features:

DO Load Balancer:

  • Allows you to balance requests between multiple droplets
  • All traffic between the load balancer and your droplets is done over the private network where traffic is unmetered
  • Provides a fixed $20/month cost
  • Built in SSL (LetsEncrypt)
  • Does not include a CDN (site is available from a single region)

CloudFlare:

  • Provides a CDN (site is available from multiple regions)
  • Balances load between servers over the public network
  • Built in SSL
  • Bills separately from your droplets based on features and # of DNS requests.

Both services provide good features for their price points so you will want to decide which way to go based on which features are most important for your use case.

rushpro • May 26, 2018

You may also want to consider AWS Load Balancers. They have a free tier. (http://aws.amazon.com)

yiting950 • May 18, 2019

AWS is really expensive as ** , free tier or not the data migration is a waste of time and effort. Furthermore, AWS Free Tier has its limit.

The last thing you want is your website to go offline during migration isn’t it.