29 pointsby MyNameIsTito13 hours ago15 comments
  • viraptor4 hours ago
    CF is the internet cancer right now and one day they'll start the squeeze. Just go with someone else unless you want that future. There are other providers for DDoS protection (as a bonus they're not known for protecting criminals themselves). There are also cloud providers for various services, or you can go with VPS/dedicated.

    On a technical level, their support is really bad. They want you to do all the debugging and data collection like they have no access to anything - until you start escalating. I experienced that multiple times.

  • breckenedge12 hours ago
    Four years ago I was a reluctant maintainer of a Cloudflare workers setup. At the time, my thoughts were “Cloudflare is not my app, yet because of these workers, it’s performing business logic, which doesn’t feel right. I want Cloudflare to just be a dumb shield preventing DDOS attacks.”

    Now that I’ve used it for a few years professionally, my opinions are much more nuanced and hard to put into words. Cloudflare’s products are mostly pretty good, and the cost savings are very attractive. You just have to be willing to work at their level.

    • kankerlijer12 hours ago
      Well, I'd be interested to hear what some of those nuances are, personally. I primarily work in highly regulated industries and air gapped environments. I probably bother to do things that are considered a bother by most, like stick with k8s for most deployment scenarios. I play with CF on my home network and I just don't get it outside of ddos protection and fast delivery. It seems like a nightmare to maintain in the long run. What am I missing?
    • tonyhart712 hours ago
      Yeah the only problem for me that Cloudflare is so dominant and Tech x monopoly is not a good combination

      also they are becoming cloud service provider that can really threaten many big player because from bandwidth alone is real game changer

      • sroerick12 hours ago
        They really are quite spooky
  • grekowalski12 hours ago
    Or choose one dedicated server and just pay ten times less for everything.
    • MyNameIsTito5 hours ago
      Yes that is possible too! We utilse VPS's for some projects and even dedicated servers for a side project I help with.
    • nivekkevin12 hours ago
      what's generally the go-to these days for non server-less?
      • Incipient11 hours ago
        We use vultr. So far all is good. May be a few bucks a month more, but very minor in the grand scheme of things.
      • Bombthecat12 hours ago
        Hetzner?
  • parliament3212 hours ago
    Or you could just, ya know, rent a $5/mo VPS? For "your shitty todo app" it will work fine, has predictable scaling, and a built-in hard spend cap. Except you're not locked in to one particular "corporate overlord", because you can run it on literally thousands of different providers.
    • sshine5 hours ago
      While this strategy scales to a few thousands of requests per second simply by replacing the VPS by a beefier dedicated box, using the exact same technology and skills, I suspect the allure is dreams of hyperscaling.
  • h277 hours ago
    I love Cloudflare. A lot. But I don't love that they refuse to address the fact their cloud has a single fault zone.

    Customers can not, no matter how hard they try, build highly available services using Cloudflare.

    They are quite proud of it too if you read the smugness in their blogs about having just 1 region: Earth... Yet they keep having global outages.

    I can no longer recommend them.

    • MyNameIsTito5 hours ago
      What do you use instead? and have you completely migrated off CF?
  • sastraxi12 hours ago
    I find their SQL database’s latency to be absolutely unusable, though I haven’t tried in a few months. Otherwise I agree, great free tiers for what I’ve used it for.
    • tajd12 hours ago
      Yeah agree, the devex has room for improvement as well. I use it perfectly fine for simpler apps but it could be better.

      Big love for cloudflare though - all my apps are hosted with it. Their components and generous free tier have been able to let me ship so many random things.

    • 12 hours ago
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  • mgaunard12 hours ago
    My understanding is that S3 egress is only a problem if you need to take data out of AWS, which you can simply avoid by having some kind of dedicated AWS direct connect or some such to route the traffic yourself?
    • apayan7 hours ago
      Connecting to an AWS egress point for direct connect reduces the egress price (about half) but doesn't eliminate it. It also costs thousands of dollars a month just to have the connection, so it's not great for small operations. :-/
  • sroerick12 hours ago
    I'm on POOH stack. htmx, OCAML, OpenBSD, and Postgres
  • ysleepy12 hours ago
    How about no.

    Cloudflare is a cancer interjecting itself into all sorts of communication I'd rather have directly with the other party, like my bank, email, blogs, health providers etc.

    Gatekeeping the broader internet from people in poorer countries, people using VPNs etc.

    I predict they will be the first pushing DRM blobs instead of html/js and killing the open web.

    • anonym2912 hours ago
      +1

      Obligatory resource: https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare

      Any single US entity trying to MITM such large swatches of global internet traffic is inherently dangerous to global freedom. they're a single point of failure for national security letters and secret gag orders that can compel them to perform targeted censorship, backdoor all sorts of software via HTTP distribution channels, assist in US disinformation operations by rewriting third party content, etc. They could be logging literally every plaintext HTTP request and response passing through their servers and leaving it wide open in some noSQL database for hackers to go steal from someday - users have no way to trust that Cloudflare is even competently qualified to protect what they collect, and there's nothing stopping Cloudflare from blatantly lying about what they collect. This wouldn't be as big of an issue if they weren't collecting your social security / national insurance number, name, age, date of birth, address, contact information, credit card details, usernames, passwords, and every other piece of data under the sun on sites that sit behind CF, including government websites and websites that function more or less as public utilities.

      Cloudflare poses an impossible to overstate threat to your right to privacy, your right to freedom of speech, to democracy itself, to say nothing of the threat they pose to the free and open web. They are very nearly as large of a stain on what was arguably one of the crowning accomplishments of the human race (the internet) as the largest evil corporations on the planet - Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), etc.

  • 000ooo0004 hours ago
    "Just fucking x" is so incredibly lame, only ever regurgitated by the biggest clowns of the industry who need the mental bumpers of this simplistic approach to software development. Can you imagine how 'real' engineers would look having equivalently teenage websites about things like concrete makeup? You embarrass us.
  • ripped_britches12 hours ago
    I love Cloudflare, I just wish they did container stuff for when I need it.
    • MyNameIsTito5 hours ago
      They do containers now! Unless it's a specific thing within containers you need to accomplish the stuff you want it to do.
    • chipgap9812 hours ago
      They do offer containers now
  • alilikestech12 hours ago
    i prefer using Cloudflare as a WAF and CDN and run my stuff on prem on my Homelab with cloudflared facilitating internet pass through
    • MyNameIsTito5 hours ago
      That's cool, whatcha got cooking in ya Homelab?

      I also utilse Zero Trust for a few projects and panels for some servers

  • HotGarbage12 hours ago
    Get out of here with this slop.
  • fatih-erikli-cg12 hours ago
    [dead]
  • moralestapia12 hours ago
    Imagine the CEO of CloudFlare coming to the thread to tell you he doesn't like the free marketing.

    As dumb as it sounds, I've witnessed a similar thing not long ago, lol.

    (Different company, not CloudFlare. I really like CF.)