> I am suggesting you host your website on your own server somewhere, and then you put it behind cloudflare

I'd rather advocate for a solution that doesn't induce centralization. Because that still does. It's a weird suggestion to pay twice. I'm assuming in your hypothetical, cloudflare not only doesn't ever go down, but also absorbs only malicious traffic, and not any organic? Why should cloudflare do that and not my primary host? I'll assume I have XX to spend on hosting, you don't see how if I have to also allocate some of that to cloudflare, in addition to the real host, how that might limit what the real host can charge? If the real host can't charge enough to fund R&D on services like basic DDoS or other traffic shaping, wouldnt that mean I've then become dependent on cloudflare? And now hey cloudflare has other service, and I don't like the extra overhead of paying multiple services... I'll just move everything to cloudflare because they're bigger and do both... and now the small host is gone.

sigh

> The 'Invasive species destroy ecosystems' quote sounds good, but what exactly does it mean in this case? What is the species, and what is it invading?

I'm comparing cloudflare to any species that enters an existing system that has developed a natural ecological balance that includes diversity. Which then proceeds to grow for the sake of growth, consuming resourcs at an unsustainable rate; destroying the diversity that previously existed.

Destroying that diversity is bad because that diversity is what gives the system as a whole resistance to catastrophic events.

Like huge parts of the Internet going down because someone wanted to ship their project before the holidays, in time for their perf review.

The argument being: we should view cloudflare's growth, and consumption and takeover of the resources of the Internet as a whole, similar to the way we view other invasive species. It destroys the good parts of an existing system in a way that is almost impossible to recover from. Resulting in a much more fragile system. One than's now vulnerable to single events that take down "everything". A healthy system would be able to absorb such an event without destabilizing the whole thing.

The invasive species is cloudflare, and it's consuming and replacing large existing sections of the Internet; which gains much of it's strength and resilience from it being distributed amongst it's peers.

I'm amazed at the responses saying something like, "It's great because when you go down, you can point to the BBC and say, it's not our fault, everyone is down." That should be the clue that this gives them enormous power. It's also bad for overall resilience. Better that businesses go offline more often in an uncorrelated manner, than go offline less frequently but simultaneously. I guess it's great if all you care about is not catching blame.