Thoughts on Cloudflare

xn--gckvb8fzb.com

216 points by lladnar 5 days ago


its-kostya - 4 days ago

Author did a surprisingly good job hanging on to all the receipts to support his claim "cloudflare bad." But his alternatives are all CDN providers - which is not even the side of the business that makes cloudflare unique and makes them money. The piece, thorough as it may be, does not offer alternatives to products that cover the exciting parts of their business and I was looking forward to seeing what those were - for example tailscale or Pangolin (Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels) or equivalents for serverless/edge compute. This makes it feel as if the author does not _really_ understand cloudflare's role/position and that this article is just a collection of links that report of the company's (valid) imperfections. For example, their workers platform, DDoS protection, and software-defined network functions (WAN, firewall, Zero-trust, etc) have made my life as a developer in my last few roles very productive and successful. And migrating away from those services was just as easy as signing up.

It might sound like I am defending cloudflare, but I am not. I share the author's concern about them becoming a monopoly that MITM's a lot of the Internet. But the author provides no evidence of to this claim. My experience has been the opposite: cloudflare interoperated with legacy systems and other cloud providers without locking us in or using anti-competitive tactics. Their presence often improved integration even when other vendors didn’t reciprocate. When people flock to a service because it’s genuinely useful rather than "can't leave Hotel California", that’s not a monopoly — it’s market preference.

That said, there is a real risk if innovation stalls or leadership becomes greedy. Companies that stop innovating sometimes resort to aggressive or extractive practices to stay relevant. It seems to be the trend once companies get too big to die - innovation stalls and their flywheel slows and they become desperate (or greedy) to stay relevant. I would monitor for those signs before I sound any alarm.

Illniyar - 4 days ago

Load of bull. Every article linked in this is either wrong or mischaracterized.

Cloudflare does not facilitate phising - it just made proxying and tunneling easier.

The breaches and bypasses mentioned are anything but - they are linking to a successful mitigation of an attack as if the attacker got away with something of value.

This entire article reeks of trying to fit the evidence to an agenda.

Considering they couldn't find actual evidence of problems and had to resort to mischaracterization this is actually a great reason to use Cloudflare.

Avamander - 4 days ago

> Cloudflare has become a highly attractive target for state-sponsored attacks, suffering from recurring breaches. Their sheer scale, considering that they are serving a substantial portion of the internet, means that an outage or compromise could have widespread, costly consequences.

I'm unsure how much of these can actually be called "attacks" rather than "complying with local laws" that lets them operate in a lot of countries. Including hostile ones.

They really don't segment customer data sufficiently to mittigate this either. CloudFlare even officially says that they don't actually enforce even Regional Services and you have to do that yourself as a customer. Rest of customers get even fewer guarantees than that.

Have fun, three-letter agencies.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/data-localization/limitati...

> Regional Services operates on your hostname's IPs. We recommend using DNSSEC and/or DNS over HTTPS to ensure that DNS responses are secure and correct.

This of course is funny considering how CloudFlare has used the same DNSSEC key signing key for ⪆10 years. It also doesn't mention BGP hijacks or similar MITM attacks, because there's also not much anyone besides CloudFlare can do against that.

nromiun - 4 days ago

I actually looked at all the alternatives listed by the author. Here is the problem: none of them are competitive with Cloudflare. With Cloudflare you don't even need to provide a credit card, just setup with your website and it is "free" for lifetime.

They might pressure you to switch to paid plans if you start getting PBs of traffic, but until that point they will deliver your content for free. It is a huge advantage. Specially when you consider the egress pricing of major cloud providers.

goatsi - 4 days ago

It's pretty disappointing that the author (writing in 2025) says "perhaps to maintain its status as the world’s largest botnet operator," and links to a Spamhaus report from Q1 of 2020.[0]

If you check the most recent version of the report from Spamhaus (Jan to June 2025)[1], Cloudflare is nowhere to be seen, and Digital Ocean, who they recommend as a Cloudflare alternative is listed as third largest botnet host in the world.

Looking back through the historical reports this isn't a new phenomenon, in Q4 of 2022 Digital Ocean was ranked #2 and Cloudflare was down at #17.

[0]https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/botnet-c-c/botnet-thre...

[1]https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/botnet-c-c/botnet-thre...

miyuru - 4 days ago

I use cloudflare on my sites because my servers does not have IPv4.

If the all the ISPs can get the their networking knowledge up-to-date I can remove it.

I have set the protection level to the lowest setting to not trigger unnecessary capatchs.

isodev - 4 days ago

Very good post. Cloudflare is continuously adding services to their cloud offerings (the latest being Email delivery) in a familiar pattern of "let's make it impossible to switch".

ksec - 4 days ago

If it wasn't on HN, being upvoted by some, I wouldn't have clicked on the link judging from the domain name. Turns out it is unicode issues. I wonder if HN will ever fix it.

naet - 4 days ago

I once had to migrate a good number of web properties off of Cloudflare for a client. They were an agency that had used it as a go-to for many years and many clients, until the CEO of the company stated publicly that they would no longer use cloudflare as a political thing (there had been a news story that Cloudflare was providing ddos protection for some Nazi websites and refused to take them down, or something similar enough).

My takeaway was basically that people use Cloudflare a lot because it is a strong service with a ton to offer at a very low price point. It's a bit like gmail - just very convenient and offers a lot for free or very cheap. Switching at that scale made a significant increase in their monthly bill.

I do applaud people who go out of their way to create alternatives to major services like cloudflare, gmail, chrome, etc. As an individual it can be hard to do though, or at least not always the path of least resistance.

Canada - 4 days ago

What we really need is more IPV6 deployment so normal people can have plenty of routable addresses and we can go back to hosting more things on the edges like we used to, on computers we physically control.

There are plenty of applications where the bandwidth of PON fiber commonly deployed to homes is more than sufficient, and the extra latency is irrelevant.

Sure, it may be susceptible to DDoS attack, but if tens of millions of people were running personal and business systems from home it's debatable this would be less resistant than having a few centralized companies own us all.

CuriouslyC - 4 days ago

I dislike how Cloudflare wants to do everything the Cloudflare way. A lot of their services are legit good and insanely cheap though, and containers have the potential to be a game changer that takes them from occasionally useful to the backbone of your cloud.

hyruo - 3 days ago

Any infrastructure can be abused, but that doesn't negate its legitimate uses.In fact, it is precisely because of the popularity of free services such as CloudFlare that the threshold for network security has been significantly lowered.

lloeki - 4 days ago

Tangential nitpick: I wish HN would display the punycode IDN in the submission URL as the intended マリウス.com

I mean, I understand the opportunity for abuse, but if it displays fine as UTF8 in comments in the previous sentence it might make sense to display it correctly over there in the submission.

bluelightning2k - 4 days ago

I really like using Cloudflare. I think durable objects are a great innovation for example.

deadbabe - 4 days ago

Cloudflare isn’t perfect but people do have other options, and yet they come back to Cloudflare. Without Cloudflare it is more likely the internet would be a shittier less secure place. I think there are worse companies to worry about out there.

Will their power only grow? Yup.

drake99 - 4 days ago

xn--gckvb8fzb.com whats this ?

RLAIF - 4 days ago

[dead]

jbrooks84 - 4 days ago

I truly think all the post they do on stopping an even larger DDOS, is them just paying a DDOS service or making the DDOS themselves

phantomathkg - 4 days ago

Maybe it is me, but I wouldn't take whatever advice provided by someone who is only known by pseudonym.