Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will (2016)
Posted by thatslast 4 days ago
Comments
Comment by daniel_iversen 4 days ago
Comment by rpastuszak 4 days ago
(Safari w. an adblocker, VPN off )
Comment by jwr 4 days ago
Comment by broken-kebab 3 days ago
Comment by rglover 3 days ago
Comment by fuzzfactor 3 days ago
Everyone else just goes along for the ride if they want to enjoy the same convenience, as long as they can stomach it.
Comment by philistine 3 days ago
Comment by DrewCarlson 4 days ago
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.
Comment by MattBlissett 4 days ago
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.
Comment by DrewCarlson 4 days ago
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.
Comment by wltr 4 days ago
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Comment by Bender 4 days ago
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.
Comment by rpastuszak 3 days ago
Comment by Bender 3 days ago
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.
Comment by rpastuszak 2 hours ago
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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 3 days ago
No Javascript, no cookies, no SNI
Comment by NicoJuicy 3 days ago
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Comment by twooclock 4 days ago
You are unable to access nexle.dk
Firefox on android.
Comment by lencastre 4 days ago
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Comment by pjjpo 4 days ago
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.
Comment by tourmalinetaco 4 days ago
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.
Comment by Symbiote 4 days ago
Perhaps there's an unreasonable geoblock configured.
Comment by phs318u 4 days ago
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Comment by epolanski 4 days ago
You sure it's that cool?
Comment by sneak 4 days ago
Comment by anonymous908213 4 days ago
You do you I guess.
Comment by jareklupinski 3 days ago
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Comment by thatslast 4 days ago
Comment by stefantalpalaru 3 days ago
Comment by userbinator 4 days ago
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".
Comment by jareklupinski 3 days ago
Comment by nikolqy 4 days ago
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.
Comment by echoangle 4 days ago
Are you saying you can feel that a website is using cloudflare because they have 5ms elevated latency?
Comment by computably 4 days ago
Comment by echoangle 4 days ago
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Comment by sammy2255 4 days ago
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Comment by pdantix 4 days ago
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.
Comment by ArcHound 4 days ago
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.
Comment by rudedogg 4 days ago
Having some all knowing entity running the internet has a lot of downsides.
Comment by stingraycharles 4 days ago
Comment by ArcHound 4 days ago
1) users gave to configure this and not all will 2) you have to trust Cloudflare
Comment by tick_tock_tick 4 days ago
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Comment by ArcHound 4 days ago
Comment by Onavo 4 days ago
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.
Comment by thephyber 4 days ago
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.
Comment by privacyishuman 4 days ago
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
Comment by versooth 4 days ago
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.
Comment by ronsor 4 days ago
Are you saying that legitimate businesses cannot find something better for 1/100th the price instead?
Comment by pjmlp 4 days ago
The cheaper pool of work force to fish from, instead of folks with more specialised knowledge.
Comment by ozgrakkurt 4 days ago
Comment by otterley 4 days ago
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.
Comment by charcircuit 4 days ago
https://resources.telegeography.com/ip-transit-price-erosion...
Comment by rtrgrd 4 days ago
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Comment by EGreg 4 days ago
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.
Comment by oefrha 4 days ago
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.
Comment by mschuster91 4 days ago
They're a German company and thus bound to German telecommunications law.
Comment by oefrha 4 days ago
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Comment by card_zero 3 days ago
Comment by pjmlp 4 days ago
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.
Comment by mschuster91 4 days ago
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...
Comment by alexwrich 3 days ago
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.
Comment by roncesvalles 4 days ago
Comment by asadm 4 days ago
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.
Comment by meinersbur 4 days ago
Comment by youngtaff 4 days ago
And before anyone quibbles that they have a positive Gross Profit, Net Income is what matters…
Comment by theanonymousone 4 days ago
What does that mean? That 1.6% of their offers were accepted by candidates? If so doesn't seem very high...
Comment by multifasciatus 4 days ago
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Comment by squidmaster 4 days ago
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.