DNS

There isn’t much to debate here. Cloudflare’s authoritative DNS is free, unlimited, and consistently among the fastest resolvers on the planet. Records propagate near-instantly, the API is first-class, and DNSSEC is a single toggle rather than a weekend project.

After a decade of relying on it, the strongest praise I can give is that I almost never think about it. Migrations in are painless (it scans your existing records on import), Terraform support is solid, and Cloudflare DNS itself is never the thing that pages anyone.

If you do nothing else with Cloudflare, put your DNS here. It’s the on-ramp to everything else in this list, and it’s genuinely best-in-class on its own.