> Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing
They do the opposite. They enable small website owners to survive on the internet without having to use vertically integrated services like cloud offerings.
They do the opposite. They enable small website owners to survive on the internet without having to use vertically integrated services like cloud offerings.
Current circumstances are a sad and unfortunate state of the internet.
A client deployment of an app, that the client had behind cloudflare was making 80ms API requests take 8 seconds. It's not always great.
I'm not saying that there aren't alternatives, and that people have to use Cloudflare... but there really isn't much in the way of an alternative at even a similar level of support and price on the low/introduction side of things. The issue regarding recaptcha can be REALLY annoying, especially on a non-google browser.
As for the millions of websites going offline. Surely, Cloudflare has tons of customers. It's an internet scale company. If they act sloppy and have tons of downtime a competitor might take over. If it's hard to architect a DDoS protection service in a robust way then that's just the world we live in. But I think you should appreciate that Cloudflare sells DDoS protection (their core product atm) without selling you a big package like http serving or root servers.
I'm not saying that it's happening, or even that it is the biggest concern for most. But it should be a bit of a concern to some, and one may want to think about if they really want to use them in this context. It's a matter of knowing and evaluating all of the risks involved.
Does it really matter for a static blog that only publishes a few articles a week? Not so much.
Does it matter for a media company that publishes articles a government doesn't like and initiates contact through it's website? Probably.