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  • Hacker News
  • The EU needs to stop giving money to the USA in general. They contribute to their own demise by doing so. Canadians understand this so much better than the EU, so the only logical conclusion to be made is that the EU is currently controlled by US lobbyists. This would explain about 80% of the issues; the remaining issues are inertia within the EU, but it also isn't made any easier when the US government constantly favours US mega-corporations ruthlessly infiltrating and abusing other markets.
    by shevy-java
  • Tale as old as time (or at least as the 1970s): nobody ever got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Cloudfare / AWS / Azure.

    9 out of 10 corporate decisions are for blame avoidance / ass covering.

    by em500
  • .. 9 out of 10 unhappy customers are currently unable to cause any blame, because they cannot even reach customer service because they are getting the "bot" treatment.
    by edelbitter
  • It's actually a great service though.
    by chpatrick
  • I'd also be interested in share of companies using a CDN in the first place. UK has 17k sites, while France and Germany, so countries with about equal and higher population than the UK, have only 4k and 6k sites behind a CDN.

    I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?

    by bildung
  • I'd be interested in what data they're using in the first place. It looks like their data is behind a paywall.

    Also, funny that their page with for "Companies running Cloudflare" says there are only "887 European organisations using Cloudflare."

    by pajamasam
  • Their index being paywalled, it's not possible to answer about its content.

    I wanted to check if the 5 customers for which I already did a change on their Cloudflare settings today where on the list, but can't do.

    by wiether
  • It’s a limitation of their dataset. If you take all domains, it definitely creates a different picture.

    For both France and the UK, less than 15% of sites are behind a CDN. For both, around 95% use Cloudflare.

    So in terms of percentages, there’s not much of a difference.

    by JimBlackwood
  • > I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?

    Maybe our countries are just small enough to not be overwhelmed by traffic? Most websites I've built and launched for Spanish national companies, that only have other Spaniards as users and customers, haven't needed any CDN at all, because you don't suddenly get 1K req/s. Meanwhile, launch a global website in English, that even get the slightest amount of popular, and all of a sudden you reach 1K req/s very quickly. Add on top that people usually don't even give two cents about performance, and adding CDN on top as a saving grace seems like an easy tradeoff.

    So, why add a CDN when you don't need it? :) Probably 80% of everything I've ever deployed never needed a CDN in the first place, but I also save it as a thing in my toolbox to be used sparingly, rather than a default thing I slap on top of everything.

    by embedding-shape
  • My employer uses CDN77. Only for serving static resources.
    by ObscureScience
  • But do they offer even 10% of the features Cloudflare offers to free customers? To imply that Cloudflare is merely a fancy CDN is to miss the whole point.
    by simondotau
  • It's hard to beat the "free DDoS" protection of CF. Could even be considered dumping in a way
    by raverbashing
  • The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side.

    It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s.

    This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead.

    This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.

    by pjmlp
  • Even if EU countries want to push for their own solutions, the biggest problem is the capital. The governments cannot fund this with tax payers money because they have other critical problems to solve and private companies only go far if they can make a profit.

    Only time will tell how far this sovereign movement would go. Maybe when the US would have a president/government from the Democratic Party someday in the future. EU would cozy up again to US and go back to how things were. There’s no permanent enemies or allies when it comes to politics and at the end of the day it all revolves around money

    by sajithdilshan
  • You have to ask why they're so "generous" with giving away free services.
    by jamesnorden
  • I feel like your site needs a CDN, it takes over 40 seconds to load your front page from the EU.
    by maxcoding
  • Maybe a European CDN, like Bunny (Slovenia)
    by dotcoma
  • Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
    by Havoc
  • They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up.

    I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.

    by CommanderData
  • Something to consider if you're looking at Bunny.net: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710845
    by bakugo
  • Like bunny.net - its still tiny compared to CF but hopefully they will grow and won't adopt the crappier bits of CF.
    by jarym
  • https://eualternative.eu/categories/cdn/
    by s_dev
  • We use them en they have improved a lot in the last year. For edge services they have all the important thing like ddos protection and edge scripting. There is no replacement for Cloudflare Tunnel, but frp [1] is a good alternative.

    We don’t miss Cloudflare one bit.

    [1] https://github.com/fatedier/frp

    by frevib
  • They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.
    by tao_oat
  • I tried them with our small company. They seem ... young. Support on discord is not something I can sell to our owners. We sent a ticket that activating some of their services instantly caused bad bots to scan our site, and never got a decent reply on that. Their attitude does not inspire confidence and for that reason we scrapped them as an option. Never actually found a good European option besides them, which is sad.
    by jarco
  • > The front door is not the whole stack

    Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN?

    On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.

    by cbg0
  • > now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business

    You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.

    by embedding-shape
  • Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue...

    Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months.

    Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier.

    Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will.

    Barring them doing something so egregiously awful we don't have the choice, Governments can move fast when they want to but efficient government scares the shit out of me because it rarely happens outside of a genuinely serious crisis.

    by noir_lord
  • Compared to the Spanish empire, Napoleon and Hitler the Americans are but whiny children. It would be one last hurrah for my country to break away.
    by expedition32
  • > Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will.

    I think many millions in the EU want to. The problem is that the current EU "politicians" are just US lobbyists. You can see it when Leyen signed the surrender treaty with her Overlord-buddy Trump. You can not fix the EU with such lobbiysts in place - and it's not just Leyen alone. Look at Merz - the guy basically is a tool used by US companies. He is not the brightest but very loyal to the USA. More than to the people who voted for him (and now curse themselves for having made such a big mistake).

    by shevy-java