Firewall – Best Gateway/Firewall for web hosting

firewallweb-hosting

I am tryig to figure out what would be the best gateway/firewall to host website. As i am a developer not sys admin can't decide on which way to go. Could you please suggest what would be the best?

Below are some options i have considered.

1> Microsoft TMG
+All in one, VPN, gateway, firewall, IPS
+Hardware scalability
+Using this for my corp servers.
?Not sure good option for website firewall, haven't seen any one using it.

2> Cisco
+++
-Costly

3> F5
+Great for load balancing
?Looks more for load balancing and ssl offloading but not sure how good of IPS if has any
?Still would require other gateway to vpn etc.

Best Answer

My experience is almost totally opposite to Cian's:

  • we currently recommend, and deploy, Netscreens for small installations -- SSG-5 firewalls are not too expensive and are really robust, and the Netscreen line scales up from there with more or less the same interface throughout (we've gone as high as a pair of clustered SSG-520 units). The phone and hardware replacement support is really good. Yes, there is a learning curve, but that will be true for anything.
  • the last time we looked at Checkpoint, we paid something ridiculous ($35K?) for something we couldn't make do anything. Support for the Checkpoint was even more. It was a huge loss for us. I can only assume that things have changed in the intervening years.
  • smoothwall is good if you are doing basic firewalling, but for anything remotely complex you are going to end up messing with the iptables rules yourself, at which point I wonder why one would bother with smoothwall.

The one thing I agree with is that PIX boxes are highly priced and extremely complex.

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