Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare - CipherCue CIPHERCUE Directory EU Vendors Docs Pricing Blog Log in Book a demo Sign up free Directory EU Vendors Docs Pricing Blog Log in Book a demo Sign up free analysis Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare 8 September 2026 · 8 min read · By Chris McCabe A content delivery network sits in front of a website. Requests hit the CDN's edge servers first, which serve cached content, terminate TLS, filter traffic, and pass the rest back to the origin. That means the CDN is a shared dependency: if it goes down, every site behind it goes down together, whether or not those sites have anything else in common. I went through CipherCue's tracked European companies to see which CDN fronts their websites. Of the 44,143 companies where we detected a CDN at all, 39,547 are behind Cloudflare. That is 89.6%. 89.6% of 44,143 European companies with a detected CDN sit behind Cloudflare For a reference point, W3Techs put Cloudflare at 84.1% of sites where the reverse proxy provider can be identified, as of 28 July 2026 ( w3techs.com ). Our 89.6% is measured the same way, as a share of the identified set rather than of all sites, so the two are close; the European cut here runs a little higher. I only counted companies that actually run a CDN. If a company serves its site straight from its own origin, it is not in these numbers at all. So this is not "Cloudflare vs the entire web"; it is who the CDN users went with. First place and everyone else The four CDN vendors we classify, counted as distinct companies where each was detected: 39,547 Cloudflare 3,112 Amazon 1,299 Fastly 396 Akamai Distinct European companies where each CDN vendor was detected (a company can appear under more than one vendor) Amazon is second at 3,112, but that number needs a caveat. We detect Amazon through CloudFront, and Amazon is also a general cloud host, so some of these are companies whose origin happens to sit on AWS rather than companies that deliberately chose CloudFront as their front door. Fastly does not have that ambiguity. It is a pure CDN, and it comes third at 1,299, which is roughly one company for every thirty behind Cloudflare. Akamai, the oldest name in the category, is fourth at 396. The raw counts add up to more than 44,143 because a company can sit behind more than one vendor and is counted under each (a Fastly front door with an AWS origin, say). That double counting pads the smaller vendors' totals, not Cloudflare's share, which is measured against the whole CDN-using set. Per country Rolling eight countries into one figure hides the differences between them, so here is the same measurement per country. Cloudflare is the majority front door in all of them, but the share ranges from about four in five in Spain and Ireland to about nineteen in twenty in the Netherlands. Country Companies with a CDN Behind Cloudflare Cloudflare share Netherlands 7,939 7,587 95.6% United Kingdom 17,007 15,846 93.2% Poland 2,896 2,682 92.6% France 4,008 3,456 86.2% Italy 3,661 3,126 85.4% Germany 5,715 4,650 81.4% Spain 2,001 1,576 78.8% Ireland 792 624 78.8% The UK has the largest absolute count, 15,846 CDN-using companies behind Cloudflare in one market. Germany is the lowest of the big markets at 81.4%, which is still four in five. What the concentration costs Part of why a company buys a CDN is resilience, and one advantage of independent suppliers is that t
It's seriously good value for small websites. Basically, there is no cost aside from the domain. And for registering and managing domains, they are pretty much the most affordable option as well. And they have a few other things that aren't half bad to use with pretty generous freemium layers.
We used Google's CDN for the last six years or so but it's pretty annoying to deal with and you have to pay for a load balancer every month in order to properly use it. That adds up to quite a bit per year. Even if all you are doing is routing domains to some bucket with a website.
We migrated most of our gcloud stuff to Hetzner beginning of the year. That left a load balancer and a few static websites hosted in Google buckets. I migrated all of that to Cloudflare just a few months ago.
I still have a few buckets in gcloud proxied via a vm in hetzner with a proxied domain in Cloudflare. Not the most elegant route but it works. I might optimize some of that later. At this point, we pay for some Google buckets and not much else in gcloud.
Honestly, Google and AWS need to start paying attention to Cloudflare more. Their complexity is chasing people towards Cloudflare. The hoops you have to jump through with both of them to host a simple website with their CDNs is embarrassing. I've gone through the process with both of them. Although my experience with Route53 is a bit stale at this point. On Cloudflare, getting an new website up and running with a freshly registered domain takes only a few minutes.
Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue...
Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months.
Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier.
Personally I think we absolutely should , I just don't think we will .
Barring them doing something so egregiously awful we don't have the choice, Governments can move fast when they want to but efficient government scares the shit out of me because it rarely happens outside of a genuinely serious crisis.
The front door is not the whole stack
Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN?
On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.
What are some EU based alternatives?
Edit: I found https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare , which lists among others: https://bunny.net/ , https://www.keycdn.com/ , https://blazingcdn.com/ , https://www.myrasecurity.com/en/product-content-delivery-net... , https://www.leaseweb.com/cdn . If anyone has any personal experiences with any of these please share.
Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
When someone says cloudflare is too good / cheap to be true... maybe think about it.
They have shareholders, who wouldn't allow them to provide value for free, its just not obvious to you how they are extracting that value. Maybe its by capturing a huge % of unencrypted https traffic because if you let them do your certs it means they can read all your real traffic.
The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side.
It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s.
This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead.
This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.
I feel like your site needs a CDN, it takes over 40 seconds to load your front page from the EU.
I was looking into the IPv6 adoption of US government websites ( https://community.ipinfo.io/t/the-state-of-ipv6-across-us-go... ) when we discovered that Cloudflare had essentially dethroned Akamai for government content hosting over a number of years. The post primarily focuses on IPv6, but according to our data, Cloudflare hosts 70% of US government websites.
I have been personally using Cloudflare, and I must say, It is a great choice for small sites, even if you are willing to scale, Cloudflare works great!
It provides you with all the tools necessary to scale your app.