I’m kinda confused about using Cloudflare Free + Argo vs. Cloudflare Pro minus Argo enabled. If you were targeting better and higher quality routes and speeds what would you choose? Cloudflare Pro without Argo enabled or Cloudflare Free with Argo enabled?
I’m just looking for an advice. Obviously using Argo is more expensive and that should tell me something, but I was looking more for an answer and advice from the Cloudflare team or someone more knowledgable in this community.
This is not a “serious” site or site in “production” we’re talking about (it’s just a hobbyist site), but I need constant speed and avoiding congested routes in peak hours.
Free + Argo would be the way to go. Free vs. Pro in the actual speed and availability doesn’t change anything, it adds a bunch of features (WAF, optimizations, etc.).
Argo would be more expensive than Pro in case of >16 GB/month of bandwidth (both directions, so not really the value in analytics, a bit or a ton more depending on use cases).
The best would be Business + Argo, but not for sure in your case.
I’m trying to cut my costs down. Are you saying that if you’re using Free vs Pro plan it doesn’t change anything in peak hours if you have Argo disabled? Cloudflare uses the same routes even if you literally don’t pay them anything with the Free plan? It just doesn’t seem believable.
As I said it’s a hobbyist site, it’s not a business, so $200 per month would be a huge amount to pay.
As far as I know and have been told by the team Pro vs. Free doesn’t change much, if at all, on POP availability and routes. The changes start to happen with Business, but I didn’t expect you wanting that.
The only change would be in case of attacks on specific POPs, then free sites would be removed off those specific POPs first, then Pro, then Business in order.
Also Argo doesn’t really improve POP to customer performance (it adds a bit of better cache ratio due to the tiered caching, but nothing really noticeable usually, better cache headers can do a lot more), but origin to POP, so it would make sense if you have a single server (especially if used with dynamic content) distant from the users. Missing one of those conditions the improvements reduce.
