Cloudflare vs QUIC.cloud – What’s The Difference?

Over at NameHero, we’re quite proud of our integration with LiteSpeed. It’s much faster compared to Apache, and brings a host of benefits such as dynamic caching. With the introduction of QUIC.cloud, the value of LiteSpeed web hosting has skyrocketed. And since the functionality is somewhat similar to Cloudflare, it’s natural to ask what the difference between them is, and whether or not you should be using them together.

Can You Use Cloudflare and QUIC.cloud Together?

Can you? Absolutely. Should you? Probably not. Just to be clear, there’s no technical reason why you can’t use Cloudflare and QUIC.cloud together at the same time. As the documentation for QUIC.cloud shows, you can use Cloudflare to serve static content and QUIC.cloud for dynamic HTML pages.

The problem with this is the additional complexity. I absolutely recommend keeping your architecture simple, and not over complicate matters. The more twists and turns you have in your backend, the greater the potential for something to go wrong. Take it from someone who has been hosting for a long time, and has learned a few things along the way.

I’ve written before about how it’s ideal to have only two levels of caching for your site. On NameHero, the first level is taken care of with LiteSpeed if you’re using WordPress via the LiteSpeed caching plugin. The second layer is either Cloudflare, or QUIC.cloud. I suggest you stick to one or the other.

How is QUIC.cloud Different from Cloudflare?

Since so many people already use Cloudflare, I won’t go into detail about how it works – we all know. Instead, let’s focus on how QUIC.cloud is different.

The single biggest difference between QUIC.cloud and Cloudflare, is that the former caches not only static files, but dynamic HTML pages as well. This is in stark contrast to Cloudflare, which only caches static files by default. QUIC.cloud communicates with the LiteSpeed extension on your backend to figure out which pages have changed, and then purges them selectively from the cache.

This is likely to be a key differentiating factor between the two.

Cloudflare Counters with APO

A few months back, Cloudflare appears to have recognized the threat that QUIC.cloud poses a substantial threat to its business and release their own “APO” or “Automatic Platform Optimization” tool which does the same thing.

However, Cloudflare’s APO costs $5 to use for users on the free Cloudflare tier, whereas QUIC.cloud has a substantial free tier that’s further expanded for users with a LiteSpeed server like NameHero!

QUIC.cloud is More Integrated than Cloudflare

All told, QUIC.cloud has more features and is more deeply enmeshed into your site than the Cloudflare APO. A great example is critical CSS generation. I’ve written about critical CSS before on NameHero. It’s a manual process that requires you to keep the critical CSS up-to-date whenever your site changes. Cloudflare doesn’t help with that even with the APO functionality.

With QUIC.cloud however, you can automatically generate the critical CSS for a certain number of pages for free. It’s a usage-based service with a free tier, so everyone can try it!

Another exciting feature planned for the future is the ability to “pre-warm” multiple POPs so that even first-time users will get blazing fast speeds when they connect to your site. This is a big deal and the single largest Achilles heel in any CDN system that caches dynamic content. If QUIC.cloud can manage to implement this, it would instantly put them leagues ahead of anything that Cloudflare currently provides.

I Foresee a Race Between QUIC.cloud and Cloudflare

For a long time, Cloudflare was sitting pretty by itself with no real competition. All its competitors were targeted towards enterprises and were extremely expensive with no free tier. QUIC.cloud is the first truly serious competitor to Cloudflare, and they’ve made a huge bang with amazing features that have forced Cloudflare to respond haphazardly with APO.

I foresee that these two giants are going to battle it out amongst themselves for the privilege of passing our traffic through their servers. And it’s going to be great for us!