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)?
3 Answers
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.
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Interesting @ryanpq
In my use case, I really need a CDN. My audience is in Brazil and DigitalOcean has no servers around here yet.
If I choose DigitalOcean Load Balancer, can I still use the CloudFlare CDN? In this case, maybe I need to disable built in SSL (LetsEncrypt) to use CloudFlare as CDN, is it possible here in DO?
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Any luck with your last question @calza ?
Really looking for an answer to this as well… I’m trying to connect Cloudflare to DO load balancer and it doesn’t work. CloudFlare gives bad gateway 502.Any thoughts?
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You can’t. ;)
Just had a talk with the customer service and in order to use a load balancer with Let’s Encrypt you have to use the Digitalocean domain nameservers - which means you can’t use Cloudflare because they also require you to use their nameservers.This is just bullshit and we will reconsider using Digitalocean any further.
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You can install Letsencrypt SSL certificate in your application servers regardless of your DNS provider. You can use certbot package to generate and install the SSL certificates.
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This might help: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/cert-for-digital-ocean-load-balancer-cloudflare-dns/75974/5
I started a thread on how to use Cloudflare with DO load balancer with SSL
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You may also want to consider AWS Load Balancers. They have a free tier. (http://aws.amazon.com)
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.
Have another answer? Share your knowledge.
@ryanpq If say I’m using DO Load Balancer, where is the Load Balancer server located at? India or Singapore or US.
What’s the avg ping for say a Singapore User vs India User connecting to the load balancer? Is it somewhat magically optimized (for the first connection / TTFB)
@calza , I feel Cloudflare is good for free but when you start using the features, the bill piles up pretty quickly. you suddenly get charged for all your free usage.