Ironically, Cloudflare Enterprise is apparently as expensive as—if not more—than Akamai.

Cloudflare also has this 5-10ms phantom latency that they’ve never been able to fix, and it definitely hurts them when compared to Fastly, CloudFront and the others, especially when we start talking about serverless functions… (https://www.fastly.com/blog/debunking-cloudflares-recent-per...)

Overall, I don’t imagine companies use Cloudflare because its solving some super niche issue, but it’s rather easy to slap on and may even reduce costs. I’ve used so many similar services and I can’t say that Cloudflare stood out in any way whatsoever. It felt super limited, and even the paid tiers don’t offer that many extra features.

To their credit, they are a very transparent company that has made significant contributions over the years to open source, and has arguably been one of my biggest sources of inspiration in general, but they’re are not the Apple of the CDN industry.

Edit: just a quick edit right after posting—I never really see Cloudflare in use directly by the top sites. They do exist, but it’s pretty rare, and even if you don’t believe me, I can always tell when a site uses Cloudflare due to its phantom latencies.

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echoangle 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> just a quick edit right after posting—I never really see Cloudflare in use directly by the top sites. They do exist, but it’s pretty rare, and even if you don’t believe me, I can always tell when a site uses Cloudflare due to its phantom latencies.

Are you saying you can feel that a website is using cloudflare because they have 5ms elevated latency?

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computably 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I assume they're referring to some amplification of that latency that makes it easily observable. e.g. multiple round trips on a user interaction

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echoangle 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Even if you have a button you click that changes color when the result return, I can’t really believe it. 5ms isn’t a lot, even with a two way journey it means that the effect you’re looking for is delayed by a single frame of your display (assuming 60hz).

	▲	epolanski an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's not about one query but multiple ones, sometimes chained where it definitely makes a difference.

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sammy2255 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The phantom latency is likely their WAF running all its rules on your traffic on every request

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pdantix 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i've seen phantom latency when enabling cache rules. by default cloudflare doesn't cache JSON responses, so you need a cache rule to have it respect Cache-Control headers.

my latency to US east is around 200ms. putting cloudflare in front of it has negligible cost. enabling a single cache rule on a specific path added anywhere from 300-600ms latency on every route, just completely untenable.

tried it again recently and it seems to be fixed, but it was pretty frustrating couple weeks trying to debug what was wrong in the first place.

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MisterMunchkin 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Half of the internet goes down when they go down, you’re massively underestimating their usage.