Cloudflare also has this 5-10ms phantom latency that they’ve never been able to fix, and it definitely hurts them when compared to Fastly, CloudFront and the others, especially when we start talking about serverless functions… (https://www.fastly.com/blog/debunking-cloudflares-recent-per...)
Overall, I don’t imagine companies use Cloudflare because its solving some super niche issue, but it’s rather easy to slap on and may even reduce costs. I’ve used so many similar services and I can’t say that Cloudflare stood out in any way whatsoever. It felt super limited, and even the paid tiers don’t offer that many extra features.
To their credit, they are a very transparent company that has made significant contributions over the years to open source, and has arguably been one of my biggest sources of inspiration in general, but they’re are not the Apple of the CDN industry.
Edit: just a quick edit right after posting—I never really see Cloudflare in use directly by the top sites. They do exist, but it’s pretty rare, and even if you don’t believe me, I can always tell when a site uses Cloudflare due to its phantom latencies.
Are you saying you can feel that a website is using cloudflare because they have 5ms elevated latency?
(Safari w. an adblocker, VPN off )
You do you I guess.
If my blog got DoS'd from HN was remotely close to any of these, would be perfectly normal but as it stands this is exactly why gatekeepers are perhaps inevitable, but should never be reveled.
If this amount of traffic across a small handful of users was enough to trigger a DoS, we should be getting proof-of-work captchas, not “you have been blocked” pages.
That about sums it up. Cloudflare has become the de-facto gatekeeper of the Internet, and that is IMHO very much NOT a good thing for anyone but Big Tech. Hostile user-agent discrimination to favour the incumbents, under the guise of "security".
The first point is data for a reason - the amount of traffic they see enables them to train models with capabilities beyond what the competition can do.
With free tiers it's harder for competition to break into market as they'll need to convince customers that they are getting more for the money than Cloudflare offers for free. Then see point one about data.
Sadly, this creates a choke point for the internet. When Cloudflare is down, "nothing" works. This used to be a problem, but if you're big enough, it's treated like a weather event. See AWS us-east-1 outages, I doubt anyone was compensated for the outage.
So yeah, Cloudflare has a great position.
What worries me is that AI data endpoint they're crafting. I don't think it's good idea that anyone has a hold of that much data.
Having some all knowing entity running the internet has a lot of downsides.
We have done prototypes of distributed systems based on SaaS products with such kind of accounts, and when proven to work, it is much easier to get the buy-in for the credit card, than starting with asking for money first delivery later.
Most hosting (eg AWS) requires you to say who you are, provide a lot of ID. I think some don’t at first (eg Azure, Hetzner) but eventually you need to pay via a credit card, include your actual name etc.
With Cloudflare, you literally only need an email address. It continues to be free.
The second best is Hostinger, where you can pay with crypto.
Github pages is great too, but you don’t really get all the power to customize your own website.
If you have questions about bandwidth pricing, just go lookup the video piracy streaming sites that's almost completely powered by ads. They are not YouTube scale and most barely last a year before they have to come back with a new domain (because of deplatforming, not because they ran out of money).
A terabyte of bandwidth is maybe worth a dollar at scale (amortized globally, some places are more expensive than others i.e. Africa, certain parts of Asia). Yet the managed clouds gouge customers like there's no tomorrow.
I remember hearing from a CloudFlare founder not long after they raised an early round how they had to go around negotiating large peering contracts to make enough bandwidth available for their customers. And that Australia was by far the most expensive region because they had very few undersea cables and only a single company providing that access.
End users present like you can always drive up to the gas station and there will always be plenty to fill up your 10-20 gallon tank. But behind the scenes are massive distribution networks and a market making mechanism.
Also I don't buy your premise that illegal video streaming only make money on ads. I'm under the impression they also sell access to a lot of viewer's machines to companies that want to crawl the web and appear to come from lots of residential ISP nodes.
How would they do this from your web browser? If we're talking about TV apps, many piracy ones are FOSS while legal companies turn your TV into a residential proxy.
It's a highly competitive space: https://fmhy.net/video#stream-aggregators
CloudFlare doesn’t operate a massive cloud infrastructure so they don’t have the same cost structure.
Unfortunately the cloud providers don’t make this clear to the world, leading to a lot of grumbling from people who think bandwidth should be charged on a pure cost-plus model.
They are often down, slow, or congested.
Impressive for their low revenue, but I'm not sure how relevant to cloud customers that want better quality than that.
And yes, I know cloud services are often down, slow, or unavailable, but it's a matter of degrees.
Are you saying that legitimate businesses cannot find something better for 1/100th the price instead?
The cheaper pool of work force to fish from, instead of folks with more specialised knowledge.
https://resources.telegeography.com/ip-transit-price-erosion...
What does that mean? That 1.6% of their offers were accepted by candidates? If so doesn't seem very high...
They even do docker containers now which is great but durable objects and workers are game changer for me.
The easy nextjs deployment is also my go-to now that vercel isn’t my preferred vendor.