The security and performance of the website are important. Speed is one of several search engine ranking factors of Google and people love fast websites. If your site is not secure, it may be hacked or slowed down by 1000s of brute force attacks. If you’re using a content management system such as WordPress, you can install and configure security plugins such as Wordfence or Jetpack to make your site more secure and page caching plugins such as WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache to make your site faster. Whether you’re using a CMS or not, you can use a service that protects a website from hackers and boosts its performance.
Many internet companies offer website optimization + security services. Below, we’ve compared the website optimization and security features of two such companies – GoDaddy and Cloudflare. Find out which firm provides more features and is worth using.
Network
Cloudflare has one of the largest CDN infrastructures in the world. It has 100s of CDN servers globally and a robust DNS platform. Many large hosting and internet companies use its DNS & Firewall in their technology stack. Bloggers also use CF to improve the loading time of websites, protect their sites, or reduce server bandwidth usage.
Domains
A few months back, you could have transferred TLDs of all types to Cloudflare. CF now lets you register domains. It sells TLDs at competitive rates. Their pricing is cheaper than many registrars. You can register a .com on CF for 8.57 dollars, .org for $10.57, and a .net TLD for 9.95 dollars.
On GoDaddy, the .net, .org, .com TLDs will cost you 9.99, 9.99, and 14.99 for the 1st year if you buy the TLDs for two years. The transfer fee on GoDaddy is different than the registration fees. The price of domain transfer and registration fee on Cloudflare is the same, and it may not change in the future. The two services hide the WHOIS details of the registrar.
CF doesn’t have a discount system. Thus, you cannot buy TLDs from it at a discounted rate. On GD, you can get a discount on all products if you buy the subscription plan for a year or register a domain for multiple years instead of one year.
Hosting
Hosting is the only service that Cloudflare doesn’t provide. CF can only host your serverless applications and cache the website pages. GoDaddy is a top hosting service provider. It has launched many dedicated, VPS, and shared hosting plans. Its hosting packs can cost between 5 and 500 dollars. CF can route emails sent to a professional email ID you create with it to an email address of your choice. In addition to website hosting, you can buy email hosting plans from GoDaddy. CF might introduce email hosting packages in the future.
CDN
GoDaddy’s content delivery network service is a part of the company’s website security advanced and premium plans. The two plans cost 14.99 and 19.99 dollars per month. The company is not offering a free CDN service currently. Initially, Cloudflare offered two services – DNS hosting and CDN. Now, the firm has introduced several add-on services.
Cloudflare can cache all website pages and deliver the same via its servers. It lets you create page rules. If you don’t want the CDN service provider to cache certain pages of your site or want to increase the security of specific pages, you can create page rules. The CDN service provider lets you create and manage three page rules. Each page rule can have its rule. For instance, you can make CF ignore caching of certain pages with the page rule by using the page rule setting “cache level bypass”.
CF enables you to activate Brotli compression, enable HTML/CSS/JS minification, and activate the rocket loader. It can improve the response times of the application/website with its TCP Turbo feature and HTTP/2 Prioritization module. It can also prefetch URLs and display the page’s absolute URL instead of the AMP URL on the AMP pages. The TCP Turbo, Prefetch URLs, and HTTP 2.0 Prioritization features are part of the paid plans of CF.
Analytics
When you enable Cloudflare for your website, you can see the number of cached and uncached requests the CDN platform has served, the total number of attacks the company has thwarted, etc. CF gives users access to four types of analytics reports – traffic, security, performance, DNS, and workers. It makes users aware of the saved bandwidth and shows the total unique visitors the service has handled for your site. Some hosting plans of GoDaddy let users see the number of visitors their site got, the pages that visitors viewed, etc.
Firewall
Cloudflare blocks DDoS attacks by default. In addition, it also provides a Firewall tool for filtering traffic and keeping a website safe. You can configure the firewall to block traffic from certain countries, allow access to URLs, allow known bots to access your site, allow users/bots with a CF assigned threat score to access your site’s pages, block/allow specific user agents, etc.
CF lets users see the firewall activity in the dashboard. The Firewall is a free feature in Cloudflare. CF lets users create managed rules by purchasing the Firewall Pro plan. GoDaddy’s website security Standard, Advanced, and Premium plan let users activate the web application firewall. The GoDaddy WAF will block attempts to hack your website.
Images
Processing images is a CPU-intensive task, and unoptimized images can take a massive amount of server storage memory. CF can resize pictures on its servers. It can also optimize or store the images and serve them. It resizes 20 images for free and has launched a paid subscription plan for users who want to use CF’s image resizing/optimization/delivery service.
The company charges $5/month for 100k images and $1/month for the delivery of 100k images. GoDaddy doesn’t offer an image optimization service. If you’re using WordPress, you can use an image optimization plugin such as Smush or Imagify to resize or convert photos from one format to another.
Workers
Workers are serverless applications powered by the Cloudflare infrastructure. For example, you can build a static site from scratch and deploy it on the Cloudflare platform with CF workers. CF workers support static pages only. Dynamic pages, such as a page with a form, may not work. GoDaddy doesn’t offer a feature such as CF Workers.
Closing words: These are the most significant differences between CF and GD. As you can see above, CF offers many unique paid features and free services that you can use. GoDaddy offers a complete hosting package. It also lets you buy email hosting plans.
