Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
2025-08-01T15:30:48Z
Aug 1, 2025
Fastly has POPs with huge servers across the world, so it works effectively everywhere except the mainland China region. They don't have a presence in mainland China compared to Akamai. When we have our business running in mainland China, we have to manage that close to the China mainland, such as Hong Kong and other nearby regions. Another downside of Fastly is that when we wanted to migrate our API domains, it's lacking the WebSocket protocol. They say it's supported, but it's not fully implemented yet. We tried to implement that and faced some issues with the connections because it requires bidirectional communication through WebSockets, unlike HTTPS or HTTP.
What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is very complicated to calculate the pricing because every delivery region has a different price. AWS also has prices per region, which is a mess because, very often, you have customers who don't know how much traffic they have in what region. Offering them a service and competing against someone who knows that it's very hard because the pricing is per region, and that makes it very complicated to find solid pricing for the tool. There are customers who shift their traffic. One day, they have a lot of traffic in Europe, and then the next day, they have lots of traffic in Latin America, and then there is always a different price sheet. The tool basically follows the market. The tool tries to offer everything. I would like the tool to have a much stronger integration of the security product on the platform because products like bot manager or WAF used to be not native. You have to buy Fastly and then some sort of cooperation with some other WAF vendors is needed, but that is not what I am looking for currently.
Information Technology Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Top 10
2024-01-22T19:38:47Z
Jan 22, 2024
Stronger analytics would be helpful like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned. It doesn't show the number of properties where a configuration change happened within a specific timeframe, or there's some options. There's a lot in that area where things could be improved.
Fastly's customer service area needs improvement. They should respond faster. They take time to organize internal team meetings after we raise the ticket.
The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.
CDN & Cybersecurity Engineer - Web performance & security at CDN Tech / Ecritel
Real User
2021-01-04T11:23:00Z
Jan 4, 2021
It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning. Even though the documentation is well done, you need to practice a lot to be able to do what you want. It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production. It is missing a statistical view to see multiple websites of our choice at once. Currently, you can see statistics for only one website, or for all of your websites, but not for a list you choose.
Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.
Fastly has POPs with huge servers across the world, so it works effectively everywhere except the mainland China region. They don't have a presence in mainland China compared to Akamai. When we have our business running in mainland China, we have to manage that close to the China mainland, such as Hong Kong and other nearby regions. Another downside of Fastly is that when we wanted to migrate our API domains, it's lacking the WebSocket protocol. They say it's supported, but it's not fully implemented yet. We tried to implement that and faced some issues with the connections because it requires bidirectional communication through WebSockets, unlike HTTPS or HTTP.
What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is very complicated to calculate the pricing because every delivery region has a different price. AWS also has prices per region, which is a mess because, very often, you have customers who don't know how much traffic they have in what region. Offering them a service and competing against someone who knows that it's very hard because the pricing is per region, and that makes it very complicated to find solid pricing for the tool. There are customers who shift their traffic. One day, they have a lot of traffic in Europe, and then the next day, they have lots of traffic in Latin America, and then there is always a different price sheet. The tool basically follows the market. The tool tries to offer everything. I would like the tool to have a much stronger integration of the security product on the platform because products like bot manager or WAF used to be not native. You have to buy Fastly and then some sort of cooperation with some other WAF vendors is needed, but that is not what I am looking for currently.
Stronger analytics would be helpful like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned. It doesn't show the number of properties where a configuration change happened within a specific timeframe, or there's some options. There's a lot in that area where things could be improved.
Fastly's customer service area needs improvement. They should respond faster. They take time to organize internal team meetings after we raise the ticket.
The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.
Support is not that great.
The solution's pricing could be better.
It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning. Even though the documentation is well done, you need to practice a lot to be able to do what you want. It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production. It is missing a statistical view to see multiple websites of our choice at once. Currently, you can see statistics for only one website, or for all of your websites, but not for a list you choose.