Technology

And then someone posts your tiny hobby site to a popular forum and you get hugged to death. There are plenty of people who say they don’t like centralization (which is fair), and a lot who mention not using Cloudflare (which is fair), but there exists plenty of great reasons to use the tech whether you like it or not.

Instead we should be focused on what the alternatives are depending on your needs, recommending solutions to actual problems, rather than just yelling at the sky.

• https://fastly.com/
• https://deflect.ca/
• https://www.imperva.com/

Those are just a few I’ve used in the past in enterprise settings, but there are a lot out there.

I promise you, cloudflare is down less often than my self hosted sites. >.>

One of the biggest appeals of CloudFlare (aside from DDoS protection) is they don't charge absurd^[unless you're big enough they think they can shake you down] prices for bandwidth egress. AWS, et al have honestly predatory bandwidth pricing, they could be 1/5 and still profitable.

So given the choice of paying $30 in AWS egress that could balloon to hundreds, or a flat $20/mo, it's not hard to see why so many people choose CloudFlare.

In all honesty, the constant rambling against any service provider when something goes wrong is tiring. as. fuck.

"I'm not using anything, I'm self-hosting everything and no cloudflare can take ME down!" - hot stuff buddy, let's talk again when at some point you'll have something interesting and get hugged to death. Or when something of your diy self hosted stack breaks or gets taken down by an attack.

"I'm not using (big company name) but (small startup name), and I'm not having any issues!" - wow, great, obviously the goal of the company is to stay as small as they are and supply your service. Let's talk again too, when at some point your friendly startup gets sold, or grows more. Oh btw, smaller company usually also means less resources.

"That's all because they are using centralized services, we need to federate everything to not have a single point of failure" - federation alone won't help if the centralized service has several magnitudes of resources more. Any single cloudflare exit node can probably handle several times the load of the fediverse. We've seen lemmy instances go down all the same, and this will happen with any infrastructure.

I'm not supporting big companies having that much market share and the amount of control over the Internet as a whole that they have. But, have at least some respect from a technical standpoint for the things they've built. I'd say way over 80% here haven't seen infrastructure, traffic and software on a scale that's even remotely close to the big players, but are waffling about how this or that is better and how those problems should be solved and handled. Sit the fuck down.

No one's going to bother DDoSing your dinky little server

In the age of AI we now live in there's more money in data centres than sense, and both venture capital backed businesses and malicious actors (am I repeating myself?) can cast stupidly wide nets.

That said I want to see more alternatives to cloudflare, like a Euro option.

in case you need more reasons agains cloudflare https://www.devever.net/~hl/cloudflare they are really very harmful to both privacy and security of everyone on the internet i think.