As a small business grows, the need for a firewall grows. Most firewalls for small business (5 ? 100 systems) have hidden costs that go beyond their initial price, sometimes way beyond. For instance,
with Linksys, Dlink, Netgear, TrendNet are cheap to start with, but will cost more later on because of time spent troubleshooting bugs in the firewall or a locked up network, or insufficient throughput causes trouble, or time spent updating firmware, headaches, etc.
Then there’s SonicWall; the initial price is high for a small business and the subscriptions for support or additional features (some of which you really need) will really kill your budget.
The list goes on: WatchGuard Firebox: Subscriptions for things you need; Cisco, 3Com, Juniper NetScreen, etc. There are pros and cons for each of them.
In researching a new firewall, frequently, the marketing hype is mostly boloney and never gives a hint as to whether the box actually works without additional costs or what the hidden costs are. Sometimes the additional costs are necessary, and sometimes they’re not.
So, my question is: Which firewall(s) do you like for SMBs and won’t kill you with extra costs?