Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will (2016)(webmasters.stackexchange.com) |
Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will (2016)(webmasters.stackexchange.com) |
(Safari w. an adblocker, VPN off )
I do enjoy some of the free cloudflare services for personal projects, but to act like they provide some great infallible business structure or services is ridiculous.
On the topic of caching I run my own edge nodes, no regrets. Privacy maintained, finer grained controls, no large scale ddos protection but I have never needed it.
No Javascript, no cookies, no SNI
You are unable to access nexle.dk
Firefox on android.
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.
You do you I guess.
You sure it's that cool?
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".
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?
my latency to US east is around 200ms. putting cloudflare in front of it has negligible cost. enabling a single cache rule on a specific path added anywhere from 300-600ms latency on every route, just completely untenable.
tried it again recently and it seems to be fixed, but it was pretty frustrating couple weeks trying to debug what was wrong in the first place.
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 charged for our product for years (over a million people have paid for it since 2016) and have now made it free for individuals. Before we could, we had to work out what it was going to cost us in server, staffing and some form of a profit. What still decides who pays is those that can afford and get the most value at scale from our solutions. So now, 50 million users get a canva and adobe replacement for free, while 13000+ businesses with more than 1 user pay - and individuals get the choice to pay for AI on top if they wish or extra our of fair use consumption.
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.
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.
And before anyone quibbles that they have a positive Gross Profit, Net Income is what matters…
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.
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.
What, Hetzner requires sending the image of a passport or other photo ID just to open an account (as a U.S. customer), unless they relaxed that in the past few years. They’re among the worst, or just the worst since I don’t recall another provider doing that.
They're a German company and thus bound to German telecommunications law.
What does that mean? That 1.6% of their offers were accepted by candidates? If so doesn't seem very high...
I would not trust any business on the assumption Cloudflare keeps their stuff available for free. The enshittification and squeeze part is inevitable.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/NET/financials/annual...
[2] https://tracxn.com/d/companies/cloudflare/__IL42hIOXmhTb0V8O...
My evidence is that I made it the fuck up, but if it turns out to be true everybody will groan and say they should have guessed. I don't want to be like that, so I'm saying it now.
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
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?
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.
https://resources.telegeography.com/ip-transit-price-erosion...
Everyone else just goes along for the ride if they want to enjoy the same convenience, as long as they can stomach it.
I'm not doing Anycast or GSLB as it is just for a hobby site. If it ever grew in popularity (unlikely) then I would probably just do DNS GSLB in PowerDNS with PowerGSLB.
For me it was not a lot of work because it is a hobby. I'm sure others here could automate this in Anisble, Docker, Podman and probably have. My setup is probably childs-play compared to what others here do professionally.
The cheaper pool of work force to fish from, instead of folks with more specialised knowledge.
1) users gave to configure this and not all will 2) you have to trust Cloudflare
I put https://www.gbif.org/ behind Cloudflare on the business plan, and so far (it's been roughly a year) we've only had a couple of reports of blocking, and both seemed likely to be caused by other users on the same IP scraping the site.
Sometimes sites like hubspot block me without WARP, but it's usually small blogs or technical project sites that give me trouble.
So it could have to do with free vs paid plans being more aggressive with default rules.
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.
Perhaps there's an unreasonable geoblock configured.