Optimizing Cloudflare BYOIP cost
When a discussion comes about an iGaming company being compliant with a cloud platform, such as Cloudflare, oftentimes means to have a dedicated IP space (ip prefix) for your account assigned on the platform. There are many ways to implement that, and it all falls on the customer’s shoulders, whereas customers rarely have experience with BYOIP, and the cost of such project can easily escalate due to inexperience in preparation, leasing, onboarding, configuration and maintenance of an IP space (ip prefix). Especially, if you are managing hundreds of brands or landing pages.
Long story short, we have quite extensive experience in this field and have done 100s of successful implementations. We provide our customers a compliance platform to achieve your goals and optimize costs of Cloudflare BYOIP usage. Please, use our contact form or [email protected] to reach out to us for assistance.
Preparation for Cloudflare BYOIP
Cloudflare BYOIP is an Enterprise only product. It means, your websites should be on the Enterprise plan, or an alias of a website on the Enterprise plan.
That requires revisiting your current websites and deciding which of them should be moved to the Enterprise plan with BYOIP, and which ones can be removed as obsolete or unused.
In Enterprise contracts, Cloudflare uses annual commitments. Therefore, it is important to include your growth plans for the next 12 months to get the best cost optimization without unexpected extra charges.
For example, If after revisiting current websites, you need only 400 of them, and you know that 100 websites will become obsolete due to finished projects. You also know that during the next 12 months you are going to launch new projects requiring 200 websites. Then you can calculate your commitment as 400 minus 100 and plus 200 is 500 websites.
Now, you need to decide how you would like to allocate 500 websites to BYOIP. Basically, you need to decide between two approaches:
- Each website requires a unique IP address
- Websites can reuse the same IP addresses
Why is that important? Because an IP prefix for BYOIP has a limited number of IP addresses available, and if you need a unique IP address per website, you need to choose the right size of IP prefix.
A simple ref list:
- /24 has 254 IPs available (254 websites on unique IP addresses)
- /23 has 510 IPs available (510 websites on unique IP addresses)
- /22 has 1022 IPs available (1022 websites on unique IP addresses)
- /21 has 2046 IPs available (2046 websites on unique IP addresses)
- /20 has 4094 IPs available (4094 websites on unique IP addresses)
Less than /24 isn’t possible due to how the Internet works, to lease larger than /22 is problematic due to little availability of IPv4 prefixes.
For the sake of this article, let’s consider that you need 500 websites and a /23 IP prefix to give each website a unique IP address.
Why is /23 important? Why not two /24 which give you 508 unique IP addresses? Cloudflare uses the number of IP prefixes, and not their size. You can use two /24, but it requires two BYOIP in your contract which significantly increases Cloudflare BYOIP cost.
Leasing an IP prefix
After preparation for Cloudflare BYOIP, when you already know the number of websites and the size of the desired prefix, you need to lease an IP prefix. There are many companies which provide IP prefixes for leasing, you can easily google them by “IP leasing”, “Rent IP prefix”, etc.
And, this is the first step when you can overspend money. At the moment of this article, March 2024, average price per IP is around 50 cent USD, so if you need /24, you should pay around 128 USD per month for its leasing.
Another important thing to consider is the leasing period. Different leasing companies have different terms. For example, some of them are 1-month terms. It means, there is not a guarantee that you’ll be able to prolong the prefix usage afterward. That’s why you should pay attention and require at least a 12-month term. Otherwise, if you change a prefix after a month or two, it will require an additional BYOIP onboarding, and any additional BYOIP onboarding within 12 months is considered by Cloudflare as an additional BYOIP purchase, and that can become an unexpected high bill.
Besides that, you need LOA (Letter of Authorization) and LOI (Letter of intent). LOA confirms that the prefix owner allows Cloudflare to announce the prefix, LOI confirms leasing between you and the prefix owner. Please, check with the leasing company that they are capable of providing both LOA and LOI on request. There are resellers on the market that don’t have such authority.
The last step is to configure IRR entry (Internet Routing Registry) by creating a route object. Some leasing companies can help you with that, others leave that fully on your discretion.
To lease a prefix for Cloudflare BYOIP, isn’t straightforward and can become an issue if a wrong leasing company has been chosen. However, with a right leasing company, it will still take days, highly-likely weeks, to find a suitable IP prefix for 12-month terms and to obtain LOA and LOI for it.
And, this was only the first step on Cloudflare's BYOIP journey.
Onboarding IP prefix on Cloudflare BYOIP
Once you’ve leased an IP prefix, Cloudflare can start its onboarding. For successful onboarding, you need to provide information about the prefix itself, correct and valid LOA and LOI, and an IRR entry pointing towards Cloudflare AS.
If everything is correct, your prefix should be ready for usage after 24 hours of its deployment. However, deployment doesn’t happen instantly after sharing the information with Cloudflare. It’s a manual step and can take a couple of days. Also, if any piece of information isn’t correct, it will delay the onboarding until you provide the correct one.
Although the onboarding of a prefix on Cloudflare BYOIP is much simpler than leasing an IP prefix, it still can go wrong and can take from a couple of days and up to several weeks.
Configuration of BYOIP
The last step to conclude BYOIP setup and usage is the configuration of BYOIP on Cloudflare. Cloudflare doesn’t do that automatically, and it is your responsibility to manage IP addresses and how they are assigned to your websites.
On the one hand, it is good, because you have full control over IP allocation. However, on the other hand, it means, you are responsible to migrate your existing websites to BYOIP, which can lead to downtime of your websites without proper knowledge. Apart from that, if you have automation for website deployments, the automation should be updated or even fully rewritten to include BYOIP configuration, which can also be error prone and involve downtime.
For this step it is important to ask yourself: do you have resources in your team to manage that?
Maintenance of BYOIP
When migration has been completed and all websites are on the desired IP prefix, you still need to keep in mind the renewal time and be ready in advance to repeat all the steps above. Otherwise, your business can face the same issues and be prone to downtime.
BYOIP compliance platform and services
Let’s summarize the complexity of Cloudflare BYOIP:
- You need a preparation for Cloudflare BYOIP to avoid unexpected spend due to wrong decisions
- Onboarding of the prefix can take weeks and this downtime can be disruptive for business
- Configuration of BYOIP and migration requires not only time, but also knowledge and skills
- Every year you need to go through this process again
Each step requires time and money, wrong decisions will cause extra spend, and that can make Cloudflare BYOIP cost very high. However, with the right decisions from the first step, you can save a lot in terms of time and money. That’s why we are here to help. Our team of professionals can conduct audits of your business to determine requirements for BYOIP, and our compliance platform has already optimized the whole process, so instead of spending weeks on BYOIP onboarding and migration, your business can be compliant on Cloudflare within hours.
If you need help with Cloudflare BYOIP and compliance, please, use our contact form or [email protected] to reach out to us for assistance.