Cloud in general was a mistake. We took a system explicitly designed for decentralization and resilience and centralized it and created a few neat points of failure to take the whole damn thing down.

Cloudflare provides some nice services that have nothing to do with cloud or not. You can self-host private tunnels, application firewalls, traffic filtering, etc, or you can focus on building your application and managing your servers.

I am a self-host enthousiast. So I use Hetzner, Kamal and other tools for self-managing our servers, but we still have Cloudflare in front of them because we didn't want to handle the parts I mentioned (yet, we might sometime).

Calling it a mistake is a very narrow look at it. Just because it goes down every now and then, it isn't a mistake. Going for cloud or not has its trade-offs and I agree that paying 200 dollars a month for a 1GB Heroku Redis instance is complete madness when you can get a 4GB VPS on Hetzner for 3,8 a month. Then again, some people are willing to make that trade-off for not having to manage the servers.

Cloud servers have taught me so much about working with servers because they are so easy and cheap to spin up, experiment with and then get rid of again. If I had had to buy racks and host them each time I wanted to try something, I would've never done it.

Threat actors (DDoS) and AI scraping already threw a wrench in decentralization. It's become quite difficult to host anything even marginally popular without robust infrastructure that can eat a lot of traffic

It took me a while to understand it, but the beauty of it is that when it fails, lot of things fail.

Almost no one gets mad if your site and half the internet were down.