F5 Networks has offered a range of enterprise-level services for more than 20 years. While focused on app security, it also offers cloud hosting solutions. With 69 offices in almost 40 countries, F5 claims to work with 49 of the Fortune 50 companies. Its modern website is available in English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Japanese.
Features and Ease of Use
F5 sells a range of cloud-based services from app infrastructure protection to public, private, and hybrid cloud services. You can expect to benefit from these features:
- Robust security
- Pay-per-use pricing
- Easy provisioning
- Global infrastructure
- Self-service management
- Access via user interfaces and APIs
- Realtime visibility and analytics
- 24/7 support
- Support for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud
F5’s “distributed delivery stack” integrates with the popular cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Within minutes, you can set up application services and pay for only the resources you use.
F5 provides a variety of performance-enhancing features such as location-based routing on a global network. There are also lots of security features (such as DDoS protection) and automatic failover. While F5’s website alludes to 99.9% service guarantees, it also claims to exceed the five nines (i.e., 99.999% availability).
Pricing and Support
Like many cloud hosting providers, F5 lets you pay for only the resources you actually use. In its terminology, this means the number of zones (with one zone for free) and the number of queries (with up to three million queries for free). Beyond the free allocations, you can choose from three zone tiers and two query tiers, with decreasing pro-rata prices as you progress up the tiers. Since the services are provided on a pay-as-you-go basis, there is no money-back guarantee.
You get 24/7 support for free, with response times of one-hour to one-day being dependent on the severity of the issue, from Severity 1 (urgent – your website is down) to Severity 4 (low – you need general assistance). For self-support, there is a set of knowledge centers:
