I'm old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds here. Everyone just uses Cloudflare, which is not a bad thing by itself. But do they _have_ to? Is managing your own edge really that terrifying?

For non-corporate entities, it is!

Having an almost a plug and play solution who does CDN + DDoS Protection + WAF/Rate Limiter + Bot Protection, for a few bucks, is very useful for startups and SMEs.

And compared to cloud different offerings, their quick setup and lower cost is hard to beat.

> Is managing your own edge really that terrifying?

It's about convenience, not fear. Cloudflare is free for most companies until you need more advanced features.

DDoS protection and the number of features they offer are kind of unmatched.

I often see threads complaining about Cloudflare, never see suggestions for better alternatives.

I think DDoS attacks are really what propelled them to the heights it has. The attacks seem to get bigger and bigger by the year. You need a really big pipe to filter them out on before passing on traffic to servers with a much smaller pipe.