matteocontrini Thank you for sharing your concerns and your experience with Cloudflare.
I personally cannot say that I have experienced a major problem with Cloudflare over the last few years, but I too have have seen slow speeds on occasion for specific kinds of content (almost always audio files). I'm also aware that they sometimes route traffic via less busy PoPs, and this can be seen quite often when icmp latency jumps from 50 ms to 120 ms, for instance. But then they also run an AnyCast network, so this change in latency can be expected, within reason.
But I have also had many a positive experience with Cloudflare on large websites with enterprise plans. On the lower tiers, they are pretty good as a CDN (I'm currently using Cloudflare for a site where they're serving cached traffic at about 19 TB a month for us without any slowdowns in speed - and there are users from over 120 countries) - most of the other services that would be useful are billed on a metered basis, which isn't particularly helpful, I must admit.
I have a very specific view on WAFs and DDoS protection (probably not the best place to share that view), and I don't think we would necessarily look at Cloudflare to mitigate issues of that nature. Most good WAF providers would only do this well with enterprise pricing (enterprise here mostly means excessive 😄 ). I'd be very interested in learning about some of the issues you have had (perhaps we can connect outside of this discussion thread) - in particular, how you were able to detect which PoPs they were routing your traffic through. I've had my fair share of other providers in both the CDN and WAF arena - Incapsula, Akamai, Sucuri, Key, CloudFront, Bunny, Beluga - to name a few of them, and they all have pros and cons.
But suffice to say Cloudflare is a choice we are making at this point in time and that doesn't mean we won't consider another provider in the future. We will be monitoring how Cloudflare works for us. Ultimately, whichever provider can help us provide the best experience is the one we would use.
