Submitted 2 weeks ago by 1984@lemmy.today to technology@lemmy.world
https://huijzer.xyz/posts/123/do-not-put-your-site-behind-cloudflare-if-you-dont
I really dont like this centralization of the internet into a few gigantic companies having every site under their wings. And then something goes wrong and millions of web sites are affected.
It also gives these companies the power to shut down any of their users.
On the other hand, handling a ddos attack is hardly possible without them these days.
One of the biggest appeals of CloudFlare (aside from DDoS protection) is they don’t charge absurd^[unless you’re big enough they think they can shake you down] prices for bandwidth egress. AWS, et al have honestly predatory bandwidth pricing, they could be 1/5 and still profitable.
So given the choice of paying $30 in AWS egress that could balloon to hundreds, or a flat $20/mo, it’s not hard to see why so many people choose CloudFlare.
In all honesty, the constant rambling against any service provider when something goes wrong is tiring. as. fuck.
“I’m not using anything, I’m self-hosting everything and no cloudflare can take ME down!” - hot stuff buddy, let’s talk again when at some point you’ll have something interesting and get hugged to death. Or when something of your diy self hosted stack breaks or gets taken down by an attack.
“I’m not using (big company name) but (small startup name), and I’m not having any issues!” - wow, great, obviously the goal of the company is to stay as small as they are and supply your service. Let’s talk again too, when at some point your friendly startup gets sold, or grows more. Oh btw, smaller company usually also means less resources.
“That’s all because they are using centralized services, we need to federate everything to not have a single point of failure” - federation alone won’t help if the centralized service has several magnitudes of resources more. Any single cloudflare exit node can probably handle several times the load of the fediverse. We’ve seen lemmy instances go down all the same, and this will happen with any infrastructure.
I’m not supporting big companies having that much market share and the amount of control over the Internet as a whole that they have. But, have at least some respect from a technical standpoint for the things they’ve built. I’d say way over 80% here haven’t seen infrastructure, traffic and software on a scale that’s even remotely close to the big players, but are waffling about how this or that is better and how those problems should be solved and handled. Sit the fuck down.
I promise you, cloudflare is down less often than my self hosted sites. >.>
No one’s going to bother DDoSing your dinky little server
In the age of AI we now live in there’s more money in data centres than sense, and both venture capital backed businesses and malicious actors (am I repeating myself?) can cast stupidly wide nets.
That said I want to see more alternatives to cloudflare, like a Euro option.
it will be the same problem, just less monopoly.
Right, but more diversity of providers will reduce the exposed risk profile from both unintentional and intentional disruption.
in case you need more reasons agains cloudflare www.devever.net/~hl/cloudflare they are really very harmful to both privacy and security of everyone on the internet i think.
vinnymac@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And then someone posts your tiny hobby site to a popular forum and you get hugged to death. There are plenty of people who say they don’t like centralization (which is fair), and a lot who mention not using Cloudflare (which is fair), but there exists plenty of great reasons to use the tech whether you like it or not.
Instead we should be focused on what the alternatives are depending on your needs, recommending solutions to actual problems, rather than just yelling at the sky.
fastly.com deflect.ca www.imperva.com
Those are just a few I’ve used in the past in enterprise settings, but there are a lot out there.
exu@feditown.com 2 weeks ago
So what if your tiny site is offline for a bit. It’s not like you’re selling anything and the people will find an archive link
mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yup, and modern webservers are - very - good at handling a ton of requests, if your backend is solid, it takes quite a lot of traffic before it’ll buckle.
ronigami@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
DDoS is a problem that happens once in a blue moon. Most people don’t need DDoS protection.
bytesonbike@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
I used to think this way until all this AI garbage happened. My tiny tech blog suddenly got 100x the traffic after the AI boom, all from bots and scrapers. I started with basic solutions but after a few weeks, gave up and used cloudflare because it’s free and I’m sick of playing wackamole.
It’s a mess out there.
1984@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Yeah thats great. Thank you!
far_university1990@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Anubis?
MacStainless@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
AFAIK Anubis is a bot checker and not a caching service.
bytesonbike@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
This is awesome! I appreciate the list!