What Are the Best Cloudflare Alternatives for European Websites?

What the European CDN data actually shows

CipherCue, a European infrastructure-intelligence vendor, fingerprinted the HTTP response headers and DNS of European companies it tracks and published the result on 8 September 2026. Of 44,143 companies where a CDN was detected at all, 39,547 sit behind Cloudflare. That is 89.6%.

The rest of the field is small: 3,112 companies behind Amazon CloudFront, 1,299 behind Fastly and 396 behind Akamai. CipherCue flags one caveat on the Amazon figure, because AWS is also a general-purpose host, so some of those detections are origins that happen to sit on AWS rather than a deliberate CloudFront choice. Fastly, a pure CDN, is the cleaner comparison at roughly one company for every thirty behind Cloudflare.

Concentration ranges from 95.6% in the Netherlands to 78.8% in Spain and Ireland, so no European market treats a rival as the default front door. Read the number as concentration among CDN-using small and mid-sized companies: CipherCue states the cohort skews that way, and Cloudflare's free tier is strongest in exactly that segment.

What the three clean alternatives charge

Bunny.net is the cheapest published rate of the three by an order of magnitude: $0.01/GB in Europe and North America, $0.03/GB in Asia and Oceania, with a $1 monthly minimum. Its Volume network drops to $0.005/GB for the first 500 TB, and the Standard network runs 119 points of presence.

Amazon CloudFront is billed per GB by geography. AWS's published pricing data lists $0.085/GB for the first 10,240 GB in Europe, stepping down to $0.08/GB up to 51,200 GB and as low as $0.02/GB beyond 5 PB.

Fastly gives 100 GB free per month, then charges $0.12/GB in Europe and North America in the 100 GB to 10 TB band, per its pricing page. Like CloudFront it is a usage-based network, not a flat per-site plan.

The per-gigabyte math that decides it

Flat versus metered is the whole decision. Cloudflare's Pro plan is $20/mo billed annually, or $25/mo monthly, and Business is $200/mo billed annually, or $250/mo monthly, both charged per website rather than per gigabyte.

• $20/mo on Bunny at $0.01/GB buys roughly 2,000 GB (2 TB) of European traffic.
• The same $20/mo on CloudFront at $0.085/GB buys about 235 GB.
• On Fastly at $0.12/GB it buys about 167 GB.
• Cloudflare's $200/mo Business tier matches roughly 20 TB of Bunny traffic.

The crossover has a floor most alternatives posts skip. Cloudflare's Free plan is $0/month, and the plans page describes it as being for personal or hobby projects that are not business-critical. Below about 2 TB of monthly European traffic, no per-GB rival beats $0 unless you need something the free tier does not provide.

Put that crossover to work on your own numbers: if you serve under 2 TB a month in Europe and you are not running a business-critical workload, stay on Cloudflare's Free plan or pay the $20/mo Pro rate. If you push multiple terabytes and cost is the driver, Bunny's $0.01/GB is the only one of the three that undercuts a flat plan early. If you already run on AWS and your architecture is CloudFront-shaped, $0.085/GB is the path of least resistance. Fastly is the pick when you need a pure delivery network with programmatic control and can absorb the highest per-GB rate in this comparison.

What the switch does not include

Cloudflare sells DNS, CDN and a free managed firewall ruleset inside one account, which is a large part of why the concentration looks the way it does. Fastly, CloudFront and Bunny are delivery networks: your DNS, WAF and bot filtering become separate line items in separate consoles, each with its own bill and its own alerting.

Then there is the migration. Cache rules, page rules, Workers or VCL logic and tuned WAF rules do not transfer between vendors. A team moving 200 rules off Cloudflare is buying a project, not a rate card. That cost, more than any logo preference, is why most European companies in the dataset never moved.

Resilience is the actual argument for moving

A CDN in front of your site is a shared dependency: if it fails, everything behind it fails together, whether or not those sites have anything else in common. Cloudflare's own postmortem for 18 November 2025 records significant failures delivering core network traffic from 11:20 UTC, triggered by a database permissions change that pushed duplicate entries past a limit enforced in the proxy, with systems normal again at 17:06 UTC. The writeup states the incident was "not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind."

CipherCue's analysis counts two further global incidents in the same fifteen-month window, on 5 December 2025 and 20 February 2026, and makes the sharper point: at 89.6% share, one provider's routine internal work becomes most of a market's outage on the same afternoon.

Buying a second CDN does not remove that risk by itself. Independent suppliers fail independently, and that property is what you are paying for when you split traffic across vendors.

Sovereignty lives at the origin, not the front door

Concentration in a US-headquartered CDN is a different problem from storing data in the US. The CDN is the front door; the origin server, the database and whoever processes the data sit behind it, and CipherCue is explicit that GDPR and data-residency questions are settled there. Its analysis notes that researchers who inspect API subdomains rather than the front door find far more OVH and Hetzner than the front-door numbers suggest.

If your requirement is about where data is processed, changing CDN vendors does nothing for it. If it is about who can take your front door down, the concentration data is directly on point.

Check your own front door first

One command tells you which CDN, if any, fronts a domain, using the response header each vendor sets:

curl -sI https://example.com | grep -i 'server|cf-ray|x-served-by|x-amz-cf-id'

• A cf-ray header, or server: cloudflare, means Cloudflare.
• x-served-by with a Fastly cache node means Fastly.
• x-amz-cf-id means Amazon CloudFront.
• None of those headers means your own web server is answering directly, with no CDN in front.

On budget shared hosting such as Hostinger or RackNerd, the free tier in front of your origin is doing real work and the per-GB arguments above do not apply yet. Run the command before you price anything.

At a glance

Verified CDN pricing for European traffic, checked 10 September 2026

FAQ

Is Cloudflare free for a business website?

The Free plan costs $0/month, but Cloudflare's plans page describes it as being for personal or hobby projects that are not business-critical. Pro is $20/mo billed annually, or $25/mo monthly, and Business is $200/mo billed annually, or $250/mo monthly.

Is Bunny CDN cheaper than Cloudflare?

Per gigabyte, yes by a wide margin: $0.01/GB in Europe against CloudFront's $0.085/GB and Fastly's $0.12/GB. Cloudflare's flat $20/mo Pro plan covers a website outright though, so below roughly 2 TB of monthly traffic Cloudflare is the cheaper total bill, and Free is cheapest of all.

Does switching CDN change where my data is stored?

No. A CDN caches content and terminates TLS at the edge; the origin server and database behind it decide GDPR and data-residency questions, as CipherCue's analysis notes.

Related reading

European static site hosting options, best web hosting, Hostinger tool profile, the ToolBistro radar index

Sources

• CipherCue: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare (8 September 2026)
• Cloudflare plans and pricing
• Cloudflare postmortem: 18 November 2025 outage
• Bunny.net pricing
• Fastly pricing
• Amazon CloudFront pricing