Cloudflare set the standard for reverse-proxy DDoS protection, and if you're a simple hobby site its free plan is fine. But most people searching for an alternative have already hit a wall: the price jumps hard at the business tier, real support is locked behind enterprise contracts, you can't get a human during an incident, or you need your traffic to stay in a specific region with a proper DPA. If any of that is you, keep reading — this is where a managed, transparent provider like Akarguard fits better than the default.
What to Actually Compare
Ignore the giant capacity number on the homepage. For a real site, the things that decide whether protection helps you are these:
- Control: can you tune protection per domain — modes, rate limits, WAF rules, country and IP lists — or is it one global switch you can't touch?
- Support: can a human actually help you during an attack, in your language, or are you alone with a community forum?
- Coverage: does it defend both network-layer (L3/L4) floods and application-layer (L7) attacks, and does it act automatically when one starts?
- Data and compliance: where is your traffic processed, and can you get a DPA and a clear subprocessor list for it?
- Pricing: is it flat and predictable, or does it meter you in a way that costs more precisely when you're being attacked?
Score any provider on those five and the picture changes fast — the biggest networks often score worst on control and support for a normal-sized team.
Akarguard: Managed Protection That Talks Back
We'll be straight, because that's the whole point of the brand: Akarguard is an independent, fast-growing reverse-proxy edge — and we're expanding, with new locations in the Netherlands, Germany and the United States on the way. We won't claim a bigger network than we run today, but we do the thing the giant platforms won't do for a normal-sized customer: protect your site properly, tune it to you, and stay reachable the whole time.
- Per-domain control from a single panel: protection modes, rate and connection limits, a Naxsi WAF with a live detections view, and country/ASN/IP allow and block lists you manage yourself.
- Automatic mitigation: the edge detects an attack, raises protection on its own, and restores your normal mode when it's over — no waiting for someone to flip a switch.
- You get told what happened: an alert when an attack starts and a downloadable PDF report when it ends, plus offending IPs reported to abuse databases.
- EU data residency with a published DPA and subprocessor list, so compliance isn't a mystery.
- Transparent, affordable pricing from €9/mo, and support in your language from people who run the platform — not a ticket queue that ignores you until you're on an enterprise contract.
If you want handled, done-for-you protection with real control and a human behind it, that's exactly what Akarguard is for. You can be behind it with a single DNS change.
The Other Options, Briefly
Cloudflare
The default, and genuinely strong on a free hobby site. The catch for everyone else: meaningful WAF and support sit in higher tiers, the business plan is a steep jump, and you're self-serve until you're paying enterprise money. Great network, not much of a relationship.
Bunny.net
A cheap, fast CDN that now bundles DDoS protection and a WAF, priced mainly through bandwidth. Fine if a CDN is your primary need and protection is a bonus — but it's a self-serve product, not a managed defence tuned to your site with someone to call.
Enterprise providers (Akamai, Imperva, AWS Shield)
Very capable, and built for large, compliance-heavy deployments — sold with annual contracts, sales cycles and complexity that only pay off above a certain size. Overkill and overpriced for most sites looking to leave Cloudflare.
Self-hosted (nginx, HAProxy, fail2ban)
Free and fully yours, and fine against small abuse. But a real volumetric flood saturates the same uplink your filtering runs on, so it can't stop a large DDoS on its own. Keep it as a complement to upstream protection, not as the shield itself.
How to choose
Don't pick on the biggest number on a homepage. Pick on how much per-site control you get, whether a human helps during an incident, and whether the pricing punishes you for being attacked. On those, a managed provider beats a giant self-serve network for most teams.
The Bottom Line
If you're a hobby site, Cloudflare's free tier is fine and you probably don't need to switch. But if you're here because the default left you without control, without support, or without the region and paperwork you need, that's the gap Akarguard was built for: managed, transparent, EU-based protection with automatic mitigation and a human behind it, from €9/mo. Try it with a DNS change and see the difference in how it treats you.