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F5 Review 2024 – Is It Worth It?

Gwen Rodgers Written by: Gwen Rodgers

F5 gets good marks for what it does, which is cloud-based application hosting (plus a lot of other cloud and security stuff). However, if you’re looking for simple shared hosting for your website, you should be looking somewhere else.

We hosted the same WordPress website on the most popular web hosting platforms and measured their performance
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Overview

Screenshot 2019 09 30 at 12.51.291F5 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

Screenshot 2019 09 30 at 12.53.38

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:

Screen Shot 2019 09 26 at 09.59.44

Comparison

How does F5 match up to the competition?

1HostingerCompareOur Score4.9Compare
1IONOSCompareOur Score4.8Compare
1F5CompareOur Score4.3Compare
1Go4HostingCompareOur Score2.4Compare

F5 REVIEW: BOTTOM LINE

F5 does a good job of providing cloud-based application hosting using popular cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. What it doesn’t offer is simple shared hosting for your website, so you’ll have to look somewhere else for this.

Pros

  • Free resource levels
  • Pay-as-you-go pricing
  • 24/7 support
  • Clearly defined support severity response times

Cons

  • No simple shared website hosting
  • Too complex for beginner webmasters

Find cloud-based application hosting and security solutions at F5.
Gwen Rodgers Gwen Rodgers
Gwen is a web developer and software engineer who loves to get lost in JavaScript (and a good book). She spends her free time teaching girls how to be coders, and doing yoga on her balcony in the sunshine.
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Business Owner

Zach and his company have destroyed my business. He is wreckless with his business practices and does not care about helping people that help him. He uses up all your resources and then asks for extra funds. I highly recommend that you avoid Zach and F5 if you want to keep your business going. He is a dangerous guy.

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Andrea Miller, El Salvador
October 14, 2021
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