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- Hacker News
- Because it's in the interest of an NSA front to centralize the "inter"net as much as possible and insert itself as MitM everywhere.by 5874632992
- I'm a big fan of Cloudflare and love how they've been improving their interfaces recently. I run a few sites that get 30k uniques a day and it amazes me that I can run them entirely for free - although I now choose to pay $5/month. Their services play very nicely with agents using wrangler and their domains service is top notch. At one point I was a bit netlify proponent but they banned one of my sites without even telling me for an unsubstantiated trademark complaint. Also love that they run 1.1.1.1.by packeted
- Could we add (2016) to be title?by rtrgrd
- Look, this is a great business strategy.
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.
by ArcHound - Ironically, Cloudflare Enterprise is apparently as expensive as—if not more—than Akamai.
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.
by nikolqy - Prince’s argument works because each extra free user costs Cloudflare almost nothing. It falls apart for products where every free user runs up metered AI costs.
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.
by alexwrich - > Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue
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".
by userbinator - I love cloudflare, seriously. Not sure what it is about the brand, but their products feel delightful, they feel like an honest business, they have great free tiers, their tech is “cool” and they seem to innovate a lot (I.e the recent AI blocking program etc). Just moved all my domains over from Whois.com (who on the other hand seem sneaky, don’t have auto renewals and slam you with an 80$ restoration fine for domains you forget to renew, and charge extra for basic security that should be free). Couldn’t be happier and wish cloudflare all the best!!