Incapsula, now referred to as Imperva, is a suite of cybersecurity products that you can install on a cloud server to provide a web application firewall (WAF), content delivery network (CDN), and application delivery controller (ADC). Together, the suite protects your server against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Global server load-balancing (GSLB) features route your site’s traffic to edge network resources to improve the efficiency of high-traffic projects, such as eCommerce sites.
This article explores some of the main alternatives to the Incapsula suite for website owners managing high-traffic web and mobile applications. Smaller sites can find major benefits and cost savings by using a shared hosting plan or virtual private server (VPS) with a CDN service. Let’s dive in.
1. SiteGround With Cloudflare
SiteGround delivers quality web hosting plans that include the Cloudflare CDN for free with your hosting package. However, SiteGround has some competition in this area. WP Engine, WPX Hosting, and hosting.com also offer a free content delivery network. What makes SiteGround stand out from the crowd is its quality. You can expect to pay more for a plan from SiteGround, but you’ll get more powerful features and better customer support.
- FREE site transfer or new site setup
- FREE daily backups, CDN, email, and SSL
- 24/7 expert support with no wait on phone or chat
- Feature-rich hosting plans for all businesses
- Beginner-friendly Site Tools control panel
- Get started on SiteGround now.
Lynn Cadet
With an impressive breadth of overall hosting services offered, SiteGround is a leading innovator in the hosting space — from custom software solutions to premier customer support. The company offers the full range of web hosting features, including a free in-house SiteGround CDN, Site Tools with SSH access, and unlimited MySQL databases and bandwidth — not to mention prize-worthy customer support.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 30 days | 10 GB SSD – 100 GB Google Cloud SSD | FREE (1 Year) | 6 minutes |
SiteGround Hosting Plans — Best Offers:
- Shared web hosting plans for single sites start at $2.99 per month.
- Cloud hosting plans with quad-core hardware start at $100 per month.
- Reseller hosting plans with support for unlimited domains start at $4.99 per month.
SiteGround has quality hosting plans across all niches, but it’s a wonderful home for WordPress sites in particular. It offers the Cloudflare option for free on managed WordPress hosting plans, giving you the best of the best when it comes to support and performance.
2. Hosting.com With Cloudflare
Hosting.com has a reputation for offering the fastest hosting services, partly due to its Cloudflare CDN service. Hosting.com’s CDN, coupled with Turbo servers, brings you up to 20 times faster website speeds than your average shared host. I recommend hosting.com for users with multiple websites and domains or anyone who wants to explore reseller hosting.
- Free SSL certificates, DDoS protection, and malware scanning are included on all plans
- Imunify360 security suite + Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- 99.9% uptime commitment
- Automated daily backups with easy restore options
- Free site migration, including files, databases, and emails
- Get started on hosting.com now.
Christina Lewis
If speed and performance, partnered with support and security, are at all priorities in your web host shopping, hosting. com should be a leading contender.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 30 days | 100 GB SSD – Unlimited SSD | New or Transfer | 5 minutes |
Hosting.com Plans — Best Offers:
- Shared hosting plans for single websites are priced at $2.99 per month.
- VPS hosting plans with 6 CPU cores start at $29.99 per month.
- Unmanaged dedicated server plans with Turbo hardware start at $139.99 per month.
Aside from speed, what makes hosting.com stand out is its expert customer support for managed hosting plans. Hosting.com’s Guru Crew is made up of knowledgeable hosting experts who are available 24/7/365 to help you troubleshoot issues. And, unlike AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure, hosting.com doesn’t make you pay extra for DDoS mitigation when using the Cloudflare CDN.
3. Bluehost With Cloudflare
Bluehost is a popular web hosting service for shared, VPS, and dedicated server plans. The cPanel control panel, which comes free with your Bluehost plan, allows you to easily control your hosting account. Bluehost is a great choice for WordPress and reseller hosting plans because it’s affordable for freelancers, boutique agencies, and web design firms. As a reseller, you can use the free Cloudflare CDN options to offer your clients greater web security with DDoS protection and faster website page loads.
- Support for up to 100 websites and unlimited email hosting
- 1-click WordPress installs and software updates
- Support for popular shopping carts with FREE SSL
- Up to $200 in Microsoft and Google Ad credit
- Industry-leading hardware and uptime rates
- Get started on Bluehost now.
Sead Fadilpasic
Bluehost has long been a favorite of mine in the shared and WordPress hosting spaces. The company adheres to modern standards for hardware, and its customer service resources are now backed by hosting industry titan Newfold Digital.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 30 days | 10 GB SSD – 100 GB SSD | FREE (1 year) | 5 minutes |
Bluehost Hosting Plans — Best Offers:
- Shared hosting plans with single domain support are priced at $1.99 per month.
- VPS hosting plans start at $2.09 per month.
- Dedicated server plans with quad-core CPUs are priced at $91.98 per month.
Bluehost is famous as a professional hosting option for WordPress sites. The company is recommended by Automattic, the parent company behind WordPress and WooCommerce development. Cloudflare is a proxy service that offers improved website performance by routing traffic to local servers with the highest available processing ability. Reduced CPU usage over a CDN network blocks bots, spam, and viruses with cross-site MySQL injection. You can enable the Cloudflare CDN through the “Speed” section in Bluehost’s cPanel.
4. Cloudways With Amazon CloudFront
Cloudways is a DigitalOcean company that offers the deployment of popular web publishing options like WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento across third-party cloud server hardware. With integrated security support, you can run apps on DigitalOcean, AWS, and Google Cloud with Amazon CloudFront for WAF protection.
- Choose your cloud provider, application, and server location
- Easily scale server size, bandwidth, and storage
- Launch WordPress or Magento with a single click
- FREE CDN, managed backups, and staging areas
- Get 40% OFF first 4 months with promo code HOSTINGADVICE
- Get started on Cloudways now.
Jack Wallen
We appreciate providers that serve cost-competitive, customizable packages to simplify the too-many-choices nature of cloud hosting. Cloudways puts the power of choice in the customer’s hands.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 3-day FREE trial | 25 GB SSD – 4 TB SSD | New or Transfer | 8 minutes |
Cloudways Hosting Plans — Best Offers:
- DigitalOcean VPS plans start at $5.99 per month.
- Managed AWS servers start at $28.92 per month.
- Google Cloud Engine servers start at $63.09 per month.
What I like about Cloudways is that it brings the power of major cloud hosting providers to everyday users. When you select a managed AWS server from Cloudways, you get access to Amazon’s powerful CloudFront CDN service. Moreover, Cloudways simplifies server management by offering a custom control panel to configure a web application firewall for DDoS protection on your server.
5. Liquid Web With Cloudflare
Liquid Web provides Cloudflare CDN services for free on all accounts to improve webpage load times, protect against hacking attacks using cross-site scripting, and scale web traffic in peak usage to prevent downtime. The Cloudflare service includes hundreds of servers in a global network that cache data used on websites for faster, more secure runtimes. By changing your DNS settings to Cloudflare, your websites will post across hundreds of global servers with integrated security protection that efficiently guards resources against DDoS attacks. The service also protects web apps from spam, viruses, and content scraping bots.
- Heroic Support® and fully managed hosting
- Linux or Windows options with cPanel, InterWorx, or Plesk
- Industry leader in customer loyalty and NPS score
- Servers proven faster than AWS and Rackspace
- 100% uptime guarantee plus built-in backups
- Get started on Liquid Web now.
Christina Lewis
We’ve gotten to know a few key members of the Liquid Web team personally, and let us tell you: The passion they put into talking about their products hints that this is a company worth checking out. Liquid Web boasts supreme uptime, always-there-for-you support, and a constant commitment to building out more functionality for the customer.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 30 days | 40 GB SSD – 200 GB SSD | New or Transfer | 7 minutes |
Liquid Web Hosting Plans — Best Offers:
- Bare metal dedicated servers are priced at $55.50 per month.
- Fully managed dedicated servers with 6 CPU cores start at $199 per month.
- Managed VPS plans with dual-core CPU start at only $5.00 per month.
The Cloudflare service replaces the default SSL certificate functionality offered by Liquid Web for greater performance gains. Cloudflare has five distinct security levels to guard against malicious scripts and botnet attacks. Liquid Web provides Cloudflare for free across bare metal servers, VPS plans, and managed WordPress accounts.
What Is Incapsula?
Incapsula is a web application firewall (WAF) and content delivery network (CDN) that filters malicious traffic for high-volume websites hosted on cloud servers.
The security framework routes web traffic requests to Incapsula servers using changes in the domain name system (DNS) that direct web traffic to the Incapsula CDN. Incapsula will also protect hosted email options, reseller hosting, VPS, and shared platforms.
By processing high-traffic website requests across a distributed global network, you can implement protection against DDoS attacks, prevent cross-site scripting requests, and guard against SQL injection scripts orchestrated by botnets.
Incapsula improves the performance of websites and mobile apps by routing traffic to cloud servers using advanced algorithms. You can use the service on storage with Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure for managed hosting with DDoS protection. Incapsula is one of the best options on the market.
What Are Incapsula’s Competitors?
Incapsula’s main competitors are content delivery network services like Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, Azure CDN, StackPath, and Cloudflare. These services are differentiated by the cybersecurity protection you get and the overall licensing costs.
Other companies like Check Point and Gartner offer runtime application self-protection (RASP) features that are comparable to Incapsula. Of all CDN services, Cloudflare is the most popular as it‘s available for free with many hosting plans.
Is Imperva the Same as Incapsula?
Imperva is not the same as Incapsula. Incapsula was acquired by Imperva in 2014 at the same time the parent company acquired Skyfence. Imperva announced that the Incapsula service has been merged into the Imperva FlexProtect framework for future development.
Incapsula, now called New Imperva FlexProtect, still offers top-notch security services for cloud servers, including a content delivery network, web application firewall, and application delivery controller.
Is Incapsula a Firewall?
Incapsula is not just a firewall. However, it does offer WAF functionality as part of a suite of cybersecurity products that can be added to high-traffic websites and mobile apps according to demand.
The Incapsula suite provides firewall capacity as part of a wider framework of services based on CDN functionality. FlexProtect offers API security, SIEM integration, and network analytics as part of the WAF system with integrated runtime application self-protection (RASP) options.
Incapsula: Affordable, Performant Alternatives
Cloudflare is the most popular Incapsula alternative due to the platform’s scale, ease of use, and free deployment cost. Services like Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, Azure CDN, and StackPath provide similar functionality but for a higher price tag.
Cloudflare integrates well with cPanel and can be used across shared, VPS, dedicated server, and reseller account options with world-class reliability. No matter the Incapsula alternative you choose, your website will run faster and smoother with a boosted suite of security features.
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