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Fastly Review (2024): Pricing, Pros & Cons

Fastly is a cloud computing service that provides a content delivery network (CDN), edge computing, and cybersecurity services to deliver faster, more secure, and more scalable digital experiences.

0%
Ease of Use
91%
Features
95%
Value For Money
93%
Customer Support
94%

What is Fastly?

Fastly is a U.S.-based cloud computing service provider that offers an advanced edge cloud platform. This platform, centralized on a Content Delivery Network (CDN), aims to minimize the distance data travels between the server and the end user. By leveraging its CDN, Fastly increases website reliability and speed by efficiently distributing content and load across multiple servers, eliminating reliance on a single central server. The platform includes a suite of features including cloud security, image optimization, load balancing, and streaming services tailored to augment core cloud infrastructure and deliver content at unprecedented speeds.

What is Fastly Good for?

Fastly is particularly effective at accelerating the delivery of online content through its CDN, significantly improving the user experience with faster load times and reduced latency. Its edge cloud services are adept at handling large amounts of data, optimizing images for faster loading, and providing robust cloud security measures to protect against potential threats. Fastly excels at ensuring high availability and reliability for websites and applications, making it an ideal choice for businesses seeking superior online performance and security, with reviews often highlighting its competitive advantage over Cloudflare.

Who Should Use Fastly?

Fastly’s services are ideal for businesses and developers who prioritize fast content delivery and high reliability for their online platforms. Its feature set is well-suited for companies with significant online traffic, such as e-commerce sites, media houses, and technology companies. The customization capabilities of Fastly’s VCL also allow for highly customized content delivery configurations. Companies that require global reach and scale, such as Shopify, Slack, the Financial Times, and Ticketmaster, can particularly benefit from Fastly’s platform. Developers looking to build seamless, fast-loading apps and websites will find Fastly’s network and tools essential to achieving these goals.

Fastly Company Details

Fastly, Inc. is a prominent U.S.-based cloud computing service provider recognized for its innovative cloud platform. Founded in 2011 by Artur Bergman, the company has grown significantly, carving out a niche in the cloud computing and content delivery network (CDN) space. Fastly went public on May 17, 2019, under the ticker FSLY, demonstrating its market viability and growth potential. Since then, reviews and ratings have consistently highlighted the performance of its cloud platform. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Fastly has attracted significant investment to fuel its expansion and enable the development of advanced technologies to improve web and application delivery. The company operates globally, serving customers in a variety of industries, including digital media, e-commerce, and technology, with pricing models and customizable features that appeal across these sectors. With a strategic focus on reducing latency and improving online content delivery, Fastly has established itself as a critical infrastructure provider in the cloud services space.

Company Name: Fastly Inc

CEO Name: Todd Nightingale

Est Year: 2011

Employees: 501-1,000 employees

HQ Location: San Francisco, CA

Todd Nightingale, CEO, Fastly
Todd Nightingale
CEO
Peter Alexander, Chief Marketing Officer, Fastly
Peter Alexander
Chief Marketing Officer

Fastly Demo & Media

Fastly Top Features

Content Delivery Network

Fastly offers a modern CDN with effortless scalability, built-in security, programmable control, and complete visibility to help organizations moving applications to the cloud, digitally transforming their business, scaling development practices, or just needing to deliver content and applications faster.

Media Shield

Fastly’s Media Shield optimizes multi-CDN deployments while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of video streaming.

Load Balancer

Fastly's Layer 7 Load Balancer helps define content-aware routing decisions while ensuring instant convergence and failover. Unlike DNS-based solutions, the load balancer gives users granular control, instant scalability, and real-time visibility.

IP Addresses

Fastly can provide dedicated IP addresses to support non-SNI traffic, manage large domain lists, identify zero-rated traffic, and more.

Live Streaming

The Fastly platform supports delivery of all major HTTP video streaming formats — including live, linear, and user-generated video — on any public or private headend deployment.

On-the-fly Packager

Fastly's On-the-Fly Packager (OTFP) streamlines the VOD workflow to reduce storage costs, customize content, and increase operational efficiency. It also dynamically packages on-demand video content in real time.

TLS Encryption

Fastly's TLS encryption technology helps organizations deliver secure experiences to their users the way they want - without the complexity.

HTTP/3 & QUIC

Web browsers, Web servers, and other critical parts of the Web infrastructure are supported by this new standard. This functionality serves as a modern version of HTTP, which web browsers use to communicate with web servers and send data back and forth.

Image Optimization

With Fastly's Image Optimizer, organizations can reduce page load times to delight visitors and improve search engine rankings - all without burdening the team and without having to invest in a costly dedicated solution.

Fastly Fanout

Fastly Fanout makes it easy to build and scale real time, streaming APIs. Such APIs are useful for pushing data instantly to browsers, mobile apps, servers, and other devices.

Pros of Fastly

  • Improves website speed
  • Cache replacement facilitates smooth workflow
  • Configuration versioning enables rapid version deployment
  • Ease of installation
  • Useful and flexible policy options
  • Powerful developer tools
  • Enhances user experience with real-time visibility and control
  • Scalable content delivery

Cons of Fastly

  • Lacks a staging platform for testing deployment
  • Learning curve for customization language
  • Difficult to understand for non-engineers

Fastly Pricing

Fastly offers a simple and predictable pricing model that allows organizations to optimize performance and security with the ideal feature set. They can also extend and customize with additional features to maximize results. Based on Fastly’s extensive feature set, each purchase option includes a comprehensive set of capabilities that enable an organization to create exceptional digital experiences and achieve their business goals with unmatched speed and confidence. As such, the platform offers four main price points: Network Services, Security, Compute, and Observability. It also offers a free trial of the Network Services offering to give organizations a taste. A 30-day free Websockets trial is also available.

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What Kind of Support Fastly Offers?

Because Fastly was built by developers for developers, the platform’s support team has a unique understanding of customer support needs with a proactive and transparent philosophy. So as a customer begins and iterates their Fastly delivery and security services, the support staff is available every step of the way, from implementation to fine-tuning. All Fastly users receive Standard level support with the option to upgrade to Gold or Enterprise level support as their edge cloud experience grows. The offering tiers include a free Standard support plan, a Gold plan that includes enhanced support with faster, SLA-guaranteed response times and priority routing, and finally an Enterprise plan characterized by Fastly’s 24×7 emergency support integrated directly into development teams. Enterprise-level customers also receive additional world-class technical support. These add-ons include a Network Services Technical Account Manager (TAM) and Security Technical Account Management (STAM).
Email Support
Live Chat
Forum & Ticket
Tutorial Videos & Documentation

Fastly FAQs

Fastly is a legitimate cloud computing service provider known for its cloud platform and content delivery network (CDN) that improves website speed and reliability by reducing the physical distance content travels. 
This technology will benefit organizations looking to improve their online service delivery. Fastly is worth paying for because it offers a comprehensive suite of cloud security, image optimization, load balancing, and streaming services that collectively improve website speed and reliability. Companies like Shopify, Slack, and the Financial Times use Fastly for its powerful edge cloud network and ability to efficiently handle high traffic loads.
Fastly provides integrations with a wide range of software and services, enabling improved website performance and security features. These integrations support seamless management of content delivery and security measures, making Fastly a versatile choice for businesses. The Fastly platform further enhances this versatility.
Fastly handles high traffic loads through its distributed network of servers. This platform allows Fastly to effectively manage and distribute the load, preventing any single server from becoming a bottleneck and maintaining high performance and availability. The ability to customize through the VCL is a key feature.
The reliability of Fastly’s content delivery network is demonstrated by its ability to provide fast, secure, and scalable content delivery solutions. With a global network designed to minimize latency and improve load times, Fastly ensures that users receive a consistently high quality experience.  
Individuals choose Fastly for its robust global network, its ability to efficiently deliver content to users around the world, and its comprehensive suite of services, including security and optimization features. The platform’s ability to handle high traffic loads and reduce serving costs also adds to its appeal.
Fastly ensures the security of its content delivery network through advanced cloud security services that include DDoS mitigation, a web application firewall (WAF), and secure TLS encryption. These features protect against a wide range of online threats and secure content as it is delivered to users.
The platform can indirectly improve SEO by improving website speed and user experience, both of which are ranking factors for search engines. Faster load times and reliable site performance contribute to better search engine visibility. Fastly’s caching solutions are critical to achieving these results. 
Fastly optimizes image delivery through its real-time image optimization service, which adjusts the size, format, and quality of images based on the end user’s device. This process reduces bandwidth requirements, improves load times, and enhances the user experience. Fastly’s caching capabilities are at the heart of this efficiency.
Fastly plays a critical role in streaming services by providing a high-performance, scalable video delivery solution. Its platform supports streaming of live and on-demand content, optimizing delivery to ensure smooth playback and reduce buffering.

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Review Method

At BeginDot, we go through each product in detail so that we can prove the most authentic information to our audience. We try the products, go through documentation, do research in user sentiments before adding our final recommendation. 

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