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Comment by calcifer | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a useful service, but there is something quite ironic about having a video titled "The Risks of a Consolidating Internet" [1] hosted by Cloudflare.

[1] https://cloudflare.tv/best-of/478d779664ac0f7ae7fe21064bdcb4...

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I'd argue CDN services are our best defense against centralization like AWS and GCP. Cloudflare makes it possible for me to host something out of my house without getting taken down by a mild amount of attention.

One of AWS' most important services is CloudFront.

Only if you don’t start using all of the “lock-in” features like edge workers or page rules.

I mean it takes time to switch between vendors but most other CDNs support similar stuff.

Outside of DoS'ing (which is admittedly Cloudflare's wheelhouse, but a rare concern if you aren't posting anything controversial or in a highly competitive space), you can host a site on a $5/month VPS and very trivially withstand being the top post on HN, making Reddit r/all, etc. Not even 10% CPU utilization at peak. And that's without even going to the extreme of making your site static.

Now do the same with video streaming ...

Fair point. That would definitely be a challenge.

Ah, but my example was far more decentralized than a VPS provider: I like being able to run something safely from my own house.

(Probably the only issue I currently hit doing this is that my ISP forbids me to use well-known ports, and Cloudflare will neither provide free CDN on a non-standard port, nor allow me to do any sort of redirecting to another port using their free service.)

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