Yakucap is a free privacy friendly alternative to Cloudflare that you can use. It offers free CDN as well just like Cloudflare and you can move all your domains from any DNS hosting to here. All you have to do is change your name servers and it will take care of the rest. During the registration, it asks for your domain and automatically fetches all the DNS records and assigns them to your domain. Once you verify your domain, all the records are live and online.
Here it offers a built-in tool for DDOs protection and shows you real-time traffic analysis as well. On the main dashboard, you can see the traffic stats which are very similar to Google Analytics. Here you can see the total number of users, top devices, and top countries. You can manage your DNS here by creating different DNS records and just like Cloudflare, you can have proxied records for privacy.
Main Features of Yakucap:
- No bandwidth limitations.
- Unlimited attack mitigation.
- It shows in-depth analytics. From the main dashboard, you can track all or unique new users.
- It shows the traffic statistics in real time.
- Just like Cloudflare, YAKUCAP has Global CDN coverage.
- 1 IAM user.
- You will notice almost instant DNS propagation.
- It supports many file types such as images, PDF, CSS, HTML, ZIP, PNG, and XML for caching. Since it works as a CDN as well so content availability will be high.
- Yakucap can translate any HTML website, to make it multilingual. This feature will help boost international traffic; however, this feature is not available in the free version.
Setting up and using Yakucap:
Getting started with Yakucap is very simple. You just need to create a free account on the main website. After that, you just sign up using your email and verify it. During the registration, you can enter the domain that you want to use and then it will fetch all the records assigned to it.
Next thing you have to do is change the name servers. It will give you 2 name servers that you have to update on your domain registrars’ website. GoDaddy and Porkbun are popular registrars, go to the DNS settings and then simply update the name servers that it has given you.
Once you add your name servers, you can start using Yakucap. You can create and manage new DNS records with ease. You can leave the DNS records be DNS only or proxies. This is a very similar feature to Cloudflare. However, here it will not let you create another NS record. But we can hope that this can change in the future updates.
Go to the site settings and from there, you will be able to configure the CDN parameters. Select the file types from the list and then it will apply the settings. In addition, there is an option to select TTL to specify how long content should be cached for.
Next go to the security settings and from this section, you can configure the JS challenge and the captcha system to prevent DDOs attacks. In the next tab, there is an option for integrations. If you want to integrate some third-party services such as Crisp.chat, Google Analytics, etc., then you will do that here.
Finally, fall back to the main dashboard. Here it will show you the complete traffic statistics. It generates the traffic stats graphically. From here you will be able to track new users as well as unique users. You can see the popular pages of your website and total number of page views. In addition, there is an option to see the top countries and devices those users are using.
This way, you can use this simple and powerful Cloudflare alternative. It has covered the main features of Cloudflare and since there are no bandwidth limits for now, overall, it seems a good option.
Final thoughts:
If you’ve been a Cloudflare user for a long time and are not satisfied still then you can now consider Yakucap as an alternative. Even though it doesn’t have all the tools of Cloudflare such as VPN, emails, etc., the attack mitigation is very powerful. The best part is that you get CDN as well as a website analytics suite which supports Google Analytics integration as well. The free plan is quite generous and you can try to see how it works out for you.
