Amazon CloudFront vs Liquid Web Comparison

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Why choose Amazon CloudFront

• Has a free plan (Liquid Web does not)
• Lower estimated cost for 10 users: Free vs $11/mo
• Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 5/10)
• Higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 6/10)
• Better fit for developers (9/10 vs 6/10)

Why choose Liquid Web

• Higher Support score (8/10 vs 6/10)
• Better fit for small business (7/10 vs 5/10)
• Includes Dedicated Servers, which Amazon CloudFront lacks
• Includes Managed WordPress, which Amazon CloudFront lacks

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Amazon CloudFront

Pros

• The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
• Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
• Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
• It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
• Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.

Cons

• G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
• Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
• Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
• Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
• Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.

Liquid Web

Pros

• Fully managed VPS and dedicated plans cover monitoring, updates and ServerSecure hardening.
• The SLA promises 99.99 percent uptime, and the dedicated page adds a 30-minute hardware replacement guarantee.
• Cloud VPS comes in compute, memory and CPU-optimized sizes, with hourly billing.
• Managed dedicated plans include 500 GB of Acronis backups and DDoS protection.
• Data centers are in the US, Europe and Australia and are assessed for HIPAA and PCI-DSS.

Cons

• Reviewers repeatedly call it more expensive than budget hosts such as Hostinger and InterServer.
• There is no built-in CDN, and it offers no managed Kubernetes or serverless products.
• The InterWorx and SiteWorx control panels can confuse beginners.
• Some recent user reviews say support has slowed since the ownership change.
• Windows servers and cPanel or Plesk licences cost extra.