| ▲ | thephyber 6 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Why does every criticism of CloudFlare ignore the fact that they mitigate the largest DDoSes in the world in an age where DDoS-for-hire cost only a few dollars per minute? Nobody could do that on the budget of a 1996 local ISP with one or 2 part-time IT techs. CloudFlare was launched as a stupid-simple CDN, but DDoS mitigation and bot reduction are actually valuable features for many websites. Sure, CF isn't the only business in this space, but most of their rivals are large enough to be in the S&P500 / Russell 2000, so it's not like garage startups are competing for this business. "Was meant to be" This isn't a law of physics. This was a starry-eyed hope by techno-utopians and academics when the internet was still 100% funded by Uncle Sam. When the internet moved out of its parents' basement, it had to grow up and get a job to pay the bills. Some people are fine with a SquareSpace webpage instead of running their own custom Apache httpd website on bare metal in a colo like it's 2005. The cost of maintenance and cognitive load is a cost we shouldn't ignore. It turns out that economies of scale exist. The Internet doesn't need 10,000 small CDNs and they would all be inefficient and expensive if that was the distribution. Instead, there are a few large ones that can afford to colo in many geographically dispersed data centers and who negotiated bandwidth peering contracts for advantageous pricing. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jart 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
They're good at stopping DDOS but they've never been the best at it. What Cloudflare has always done best is making SSL and DNSSEC as frictionless and pain free as possible. If TrustCor was trustworthy enough to be allowed to operate a root certificate authority out of a UPS Store at a strip mall in Toronto, then why not Cloudflare? The thing we've always wanted for the Internet is DNSSEC https://youtu.be/b9j-sfP9GUU which the major players like Google have stubbornly sought to avoid. Ideally Cloudflare would help enough websites adopt it that it'll become more practical for the rest of us to use. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | bhhaskin 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Except they protect the same people running DDoS services... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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