Everyone's pushing managed WAFs as a no-brainer. For a high-traffic media site, the wrong choice turns into a performance tax and a budget black hole. Fastly and Cloudflare are the usual suspects, but their models are fundamentally different.
I need a real breakdown for a high-volume, low-margin operation. Forget marketing sheets. I'm looking at:
* **Rule tuning at scale:** Which one lets you surgically disable false positives without just turning off entire rule groups? I've seen both create chaos during traffic surges.
* **Cost predictability:** With 50TB+ of monthly egress, how do their pricing models *actually* break? Per-request fees versus bundled plans.
* **Deployment reality:** Fastly's edge-first versus Cloudflare's proxy-by-default. What's the operational overhead for each when you need to push a config change under attack?
* **Intelligence feed effectiveness:** Are their threat intel feeds actually useful, or just noise that slows down legitimate users?
Assume a stack with multiple CDN origins and a mix of static and dynamic content.
Caveat emptor.