We planned to go for pro plan, any one have experience in pro plan how is the service availability?
- What is the Service(DNS, WAF, CDN, etc.,) SLA/uptime guarantee for Pro plan (Please note, we are not asking for support SLA)
- Will Pro plan support the workflow depicted in the diagram.
PRO has no SLA. Only BUSINESS and ENTERPRISE plans have a 100% uptime SLA.
The difference between PRO and FREE plans boils down to the availability of features and not in differentiation of service. Please see the different plans and their features here: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/
Just like the FREE plan, the PRO plan requires Cloudflare to be your authoritative DNS server. So you can’t use CloudNS as depicted in your diagram. Only BUSINESS & ENTERPRISE plans support Partial (CNAME) Zone setup, which can support the architecture depicted in your diagram.
Good luck!
3 Likes
Thanks George. couldn’t even be able to get started with CF. Lets see if there could be some break though. Few questions…
Okay, Not worried about 100% availability. will it be 50% for Pro plan? There should be some minimum commitment. 98%? what if the site and services are down for 4 hours. That will be a loss atleast not a huge loss and doesnt make sense to use Cloudflare service paying the extra 25 dollars per month. May be Iam missing something, please clarify.
Also, on the request flow in the diagram, only abcdotcom will be hosted in Cloudflare and DNS NS control of abcdotcom will be transferred and with Cloudflare,
Please suggest.
Considering there is no SLA/Uptime guarantee, it can be anything from 0% and up - with absolutely no guarantees.
There are minimum commitments to the SLA / availability, they just start on Business and above.
You’re simply not getting such kind of commitments, without you’re making a (serious) commitment in the other direction as well.
Then don’t?
No one is forcing you take a specific plan, or any plan at all.
If you require a such commitment, e.g. SLA/Uptime guarantee, as mentioned above, you simply need to go with Business or above.
The thing you seem to be missing is, if you’re running a serious Business and/or otherwise require a SLA/Uptime guarantee, you will need to go Business or above.
You can actually stay at Free, or take the Pro plan, but you won’t have any “guarantees” of anything there. To get anything like that, Business+ is the only way.
Pro simply gives some additional benefits over Free, such as for example more Page/WAF rules, better Cache Analytics, and so on.
Whether you need the additional “features” of Pro or not, or even need to go higher, that is still on you to decide.
Based on your text above though, it sounds like Business+ is the only option that can satisfy you, “feature”-wise at least, as it is the lowest one that offers any kind of “SLA/Uptime guarantee”, that you appears to be the major thing you’re worried about.
Thanks @DarkDeviL, @GeorgeAppiah, for us the website is not that critical and can be down for few hours. However, email service is extremely important. If Cloudflare DNS service is not available, it will be a loss of email service for us and be a huge impact. In your experience how is the uptime of Cloudflare DNS service in Pro Plan. If you can share some thoughts, that will be great, thx.
Cloudflare DNS, even in the free plan, is up there with the most reliable providers you can get… and indisputably the fastest. Especially for email, there should be absolutely no concerns over DNS downtime at all.
See DNSPerf’s performance report for different authoritative DNS providers here:
But if your words like “extremely important” and “huge impact” carry any meaning at all, then what you really need is SLA to give you that peace of mind (or, as we say in the MSP world, to give you someone else to yell at when something goes wrong 
).
For that, you’ll need a BUSINESS plan. Better yet, get an ENTERPRISE plan to have 24x7x365 Tickets + Chat + Phone support and a designated Customer Success Manager and Solutions Engineer.
And if these SLA-backed plans are not within your budget and you don’t need all the bells and whistles that Cloudflare provides, then use a different DNS-focused provider that can give you the desired performance backed by SLA that may be within your budget (not going to give names here, but research the top performers in the DNSPerf report above).
Good luck!
1 Like
The default for most (if not all) mail server software out there will be to re-try deliveries for 5 days (120 hours), given the recipient’s mail server is unavailable, or other transient errors…
That is obviously something that the individual mail server operator can change, but generally, you will see a re-try time of around 5 days (120 hours) for most senders, that be, the ones that follow the best practices out there.
Email messages can actually be lost due to DNS failures:
If the message that is being sent on Day 4 of, let’s say, Cloudflare’s total black out, the 5 days interval mentioned above will start from Day 4, making it mandatory for Cloudflare to stay down for those 5 days since the sending of the message on Day 4, or, in total, until Day 9, when the specific message is 5 days / 120 hours old.
It requires quite a bit of total unavailability, which I hardly believe you would find any serious DNS providers have.
I wouldn’t worry that much, not even when using Cloudflare with the Free plan.
Actually, this was exactly my point.
For a website, if DNS is down even for a minute, that’s a lost opportunity to sell a widget.
For email, because of the very retry you mentioned, and considering Cloudflare’s historical DNS uptime, that’s why I said there should be no concerns at all.
But perhaps I didn’t put that correctly… English is my third language
Or maybe I failed with enough clarity.
We are on the same track here.
My point wasn’t to correct you, or say you were wrong, - but solely to confirm (and hopefully to be able to comfort @mfaizancf2023) that the worries are too high for no reasons at all.
This topic was automatically closed 3 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.