The problem is, we need to. It’s simply insane how many stupid, malicious requests we get without it, and we honestly are a small, unimportant site.

If we don’t filter all this crap out, our metrics become basically meaningless, and our Data Warehouse, whose analyses we need to do business with our partners, would be one big „shit in, shit out“ travesty.

And on the other hand, becoming non-affected by today’s Cloudflare incident was a single DNS update away, and effective in under a minute.

I’m not saying we are perfectly happy, and I don’t exactly love the Cloudflare bill, but just slapping them in front of our loadbalancer and have them filter out the bad guys has been a good deal so far.

> becoming non-affected by today’s Cloudflare incident was a single DNS update away

Except you've now leaked your origin IP so expect increased junk being pointed straight at it. Sure you can firewall it off but even dropping packets burns CPU.